Knitting Along the River

a bit of brightness in the winter

2012-01-08T12:38:00.001-05:00

I should begin by saying that I love the bleakness of winter. When my daughter and I were watching the most recent film version of 'Jane Eyre' the other night, she commented that I must be loving all the scenery shot on the windswept moors. She was right.

Blustery cold is the kind of weather that I love to get outdoors in and the kind I love to come back home in, to settle in for a cozy afternoon of knitting or spinning.

One dark, grey afternoon recently, I sat down at my spinning wheel and plied some singles I'd spun back in October. I was able to do this because my foot wasn't hurting too badly for a change and I wanted to take advantage of the moment.

The result is about 325 yards of light worsted weight 2-ply from hand-dyed Falkland roving that I got as part of cosymakes's Falkland Fiber Club. Cosy calls this colorway 'Electric', and I'm not 100% certain, but I think it may actually glow in the dark! ;)

I have a real backlog of spinning fiber in my stash. After my foot surgery last July, I had to go many weeks without spinning on my wheel. Thinking I would be good to go after healing was complete, I kept accumulating more roving and also have the fiber from two Cotswold fleeces and a Shetland fleece that will be coming to me in the spring.

During my recent visit to the foot surgeon, she told me that the lingering pain I'm having in my foot is now not a result of the surgery but is caused by degenerative osteoarthritis. And, except for physiotherapy kinds of things like massage and hot paraffin dips, there's not much I can do about it. I still walk a lot and am learning to ignore the discomfort because I refuse to just give up and sit around with my foot up.

When I was at the sheep and wool festival in Rhinebeck back in October, I tried out a HansenCrafts miniSpinner and liked it more than I thought I would. I will still spin on my wheel - a Schacht Matchless - and on my Bosworth spindles, but for the heavy volume of spinning that I'll have to do to spin up three fleeces worth of roving, I think a miniSpinner might be in my future. They're expensive so I need to plan well ahead for this purchase.

Part of me really resists the idea of spinning on an electric spinner, though. It just seems to run contrary to the unplugged nature of the work I do with wool. Maybe I'm being silly or simply stubborn in my resistance.

Anyway, here's another unretouched photo of the very bright, very glowing 'Electric' yarn. Something to warm a wintry day.

eleven in '11, 52 in 52 and goal setting in 2012

2011-12-30T08:33:00.002-05:00

2011 has been a year of knitalongs for me. I knit a really big, warm, wooly blanket as part of a charity knitalong, a cardigan in fingering weight yarn as part of a particular dyer's group knitalong, and enough shawls to keep my shoulders warm for a century as part of the Ravelry group 11 Shawls in 2011 knitalong.

I had been part of a 52 projects in 52 weeks group on Ravelry, but since almost all of my projects over the past year have been relatively large ones, I was never going to complete 52 projects by New Year's Eve unless I dropped the cardigan and all those shawls and started knitting lots of dishcloths and wrist warmers.

As the year draws to a close, I now have a modest four projects on needles. For the past couple of years I've made 'old year's resolutions' instead of New Year's resolutions and have committed to finishing all works in progress by the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve. Well, there's no way even if I go without sleep for the next couple of days that I'm going to finish the blanket for my son, the Topiary wrap, the Wispy cardi and the Beekeeper's Quilt before the end of the year.

So this year I am making a New Year's resolution. 2012 will be the year of no 'alongs' for me. No knitalongs, no readalongs, no spinalongs, no weavealongs. I'm not joining any fiber or yarn clubs, any Ravelry groups that commit to finishing X number of projects in a set time, or any reading groups.

I now have as many shawls as I could possibly need and plenty of socks and sweaters. I already have enough deadlines in my life to make me crazed at times and know that I need to leave a few havens that are completely within my control to manage and keep calm, namely my fiber work and my personal reading. My home life isn't always within my control to tame, what with four adults, two cats and a dog all sharing living space and merging schedules, but I'll focus on what I can determine.

After a year of knitting lots of big projects, I'm being drawn more by small things like mittens, cowls, tams and such. I'm not making any commitments or setting any goals beyond saying that I will be trying to choose projects that I can knit and spin and weave with fiber I already own, since the one goal I will say I'm setting for myself is to pay off all college loan debt in 2012. With both children graduated and no more funds going out in that direction, it's a goal that will actually lessen stress, not create more.

So to close the year I give you the stack of eleven shawls completed in 2011 and wish you a very happy and healthy New Year full of all the things that give you peace and joy.

Oh, and here's a closer look at the very last of those 11 shawls - a simple shawl I worked out over the holidays as I settled into a more relaxed state of mind. I give you my 'very simple christmas shawl' with details on my Ravelry projects page. :)

future spinning

2011-11-06T18:21:00.001-05:00

While I was walking through the Breed Display barn at the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck a few weeks ago, I got to talking to the shepherd at the Shetland sheep display.

Before I knew it I was asking her when she is planning to shear this year. "February," she answered. "Why, are you interested in her fleece?" She was referring to a beautiful ewe whose fleece I kept reaching into the stall to touch.

It was a done deal from the get go.

quick photo taken with the phone camera

'I knit, therefore I am'

2011-10-25T17:39:00.000-04:00

with apologies to Descartes.

as the workload at school increases, fiber work keeps me sane. I'm doing a better job of keeping up with my projects on Ravelry than here on the blog. if you're interested in seeing what I've been up to, please check out my project page. :)

the batik-like banner hangs in my classroom over the wool table and is a project I made while taking a fiber arts class at the wonderful Materials for the Arts last spring.

a little shout out

2011-09-26T19:57:00.001-04:00

There's a new knitting book on the horizon. Coastal Knits is a collaboration between Alana Dakos and Hannah Fettig. If you pre-order their book, they will send you two of the patterns as downloads so you can knit while you wait.

After looking at the preview of the book, I decided there was enough there to justify buying the book. Once I had the downloads in hand, I cast on for the Rustling Leaves Beret. The yarn is King of the Jungle Merino Fingering in the colorway Cleo from Lioness Arts.

Pattern and yarn made for a very happy knitting experience and a perfect weekend knit.

in praise of the swatch

2011-09-25T10:30:00.000-04:00

There was a time when I looked on swatching as a necessary evil at best, but not anymore. I've grown to love the process of swatching and see it as the best way to get to know how the yarn I've chosen will behave in the garment I've chosen.

Most recently, having a gauge swatch that matched the sweater pattern's recommended gauge made me more aware of how the garment should be shaping up at each point along the way. I had reached a transition point in the Cria cardigan and was ready to continue knitting when I looked at the knitting in my hands and, knowing I was getting gauge, I realized that something wasn't right. The yoke section looked really a lot more shallow than it should.

I looked back at the pattern and, sure enough, where the directions had stated to repeat the last 4 rows five more times, I had repeated only the last 2 rows. Ripping back at that point wasn't fun, but it was a lot more fun than finishing a sweater only to find that it didn't fit.

The book that the Cria pattern is found in is Little Red in the City by Ysolda Teague. Ysolda doesn't just recommend that you knit a gauge swatch, she devotes 12 pages of the book to an in-depth discussion of swatching.

The particular swatch that I knit for the Cria is a lot wider than the swatches I usually knit up. I wanted to be absolutely sure that I would get the width I needed since length is rarely a problem for me being that I am only 5'2" and most sweater patterns as written need to be modified for my shorter torso and shorter arms. So the swatch all folded up looks like a comfy little pillow. The yarn is Posh Fingering from The Uncommon Thread in the colorway she calls 'Charred'.

I have a little stack of swatches on my work table and each of them was knit for a sweater that actually fits me properly. The swatches are not just nice to look at, they can be used as coasters in a pinch.

the rocky road ends well

2011-09-12T18:35:00.002-04:00

Once I'd ripped back the Rock Island and restarted the garter stitch section, it was smooth going from then on. I did make sure to stop and recheck my stitch counts every now and then. I have no negative things to say about this pattern. It's very well-written and the charts are error-free. The lacy sections look more complex than they actually are. I've seen this shawl knit in several different weights of yarn, from light and airy laceweight to sturdier yarns such as the Viola Merino Fingering that I used. All of them look lovely.

I'm looking forward to wearing mine.

9/11/01 + 10 years = one class of fifth graders and a picture book

2011-09-11T07:00:00.000-04:00

My current students were little babies or their mothers were in their third trimester of pregnancy with them when the world was rocked by the events of September 11, 2001. I've had many discussions with students in the years since that day, and on Monday, I'll be reading my class a book that was published in 2002 but that I've only recently come across.

The book is Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey and it's written and illustrated by the very creative Maira Kalman.

The book has mostly been well-received but there are a few negative reviews on Amazon, mostly by parents who felt that they were blindsided by the illustrations that show the planes flying towards the World Trade Center towers and the buildings exploding. My first thought was to wonder how these parents started to read a book to their child without at least flipping through it first.

There are no gruesome illustrations and no details about the sad events beyond a few short sentences that say that, "many people were hurt; many lives were lost; the city had been attacked; everyone was terrified." That is the extent of the focus on the violence. The story goes on to tell about how people came together to help and how people were brave. And how the fireboat, that had been left for scrap but had been saved by a group of people who restored it, was called into service that day and in the days that followed.

In the end, this is a very uplifting and hopeful story. And that's why I'll be sharing it with my fifth graders on Monday morning.

the road to 'rock island'

2011-09-02T12:49:00.004-04:00

Last night I was happily knitting away on my Rock Island shawl, anticipating finishing it within an hour or so, when I started to get the feeling that I was working my way through the stitches on the left side of the center decrease line just a little bit faster than the ones on the right side. Sure enough, when I stopped to count, I had a discrepancy of about five stitches.

If you're unfamiliar with the Rock Island, it's a triangular shawl with a lace edge, a garter stitch bit followed by a lace section, which is then followed by miles of garter stitch back and forth as the triangle forms and the rows grow shorter and shorter.

I held the shawl up to the light and studied the center line all the way down the garter stitch triangle and could not see anything wrong there. I looked carefully along the edges where I was working decreases two stitches in at each edge on every right side row. Nothing wrong there, as far as I could tell. So I ripped back a few rows, recounted and still had the odd extra stitches. Ripping back a few more rows didn't help, so with a sinking heart, I looked really carefully at the very last row of the lace section way on down in my knitting. It was getting a little late and I couldn't tell for sure whether I had made a mistake in that last lace row.

Common sense told me to stop fiddling with it, to leave it until the morning and face it in the clear and uncompromising light of day. This morning, after several cups of strong coffee and sitting by the kitchen window, I started to rip. And I ripped all the way back to the second row of garter stitch. I then picked up the stitches on the needles to carefully work my way back to the last lace row. I have to say that I'm very glad I chose the yarn I did for this project. I had started it in a beautiful Isager alpaca laceweight, but then decided I wanted this shawl to be sturdier and chose a merino fingering yarn from Viola on etsy.

I won't say that I enjoyed ripping out days' worth of knitting, even if it was just garter stitch with a few decreases, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The yarn is soft, but it has a slightly crisp feel to it and those little stitches, once I'd ripped all the way back and was ready to pick them up with the needle, sat right there like obedient little children just waiting to be told what to do.

Once I'd carefully undone the first row of the garter stitch section and was able to fix the tiny error that caused so much trouble, I triple-checked my stitch counts and secured the ends of the circular needle. I reskeined and washed what felt like miles of yarn, and when it's dry I'll pick up the road to Rock Island once again. I'll just get there a little later than I had planned.

I suppose you could call this a knitting disaster, but with this morning's New York Times right next to me on the kitchen table, full of reports of people all along the east coast who've lost their homes, their businesses and their loved ones as a result of the recent storms, I couldn't really feel sorry for myself. As I drank my coffee this morning, sitting in my own kitchen and anticipating having the morning ahead of me to mess around with my knitting, I felt fortunate.

'summer storm'

2011-08-24T15:59:00.007-04:00

We're not talking hurricanes here, rather a sweater that turns out to be completely reversible. I ended up with 830 yards or so of 2-ply yarn from this spinning project and really had to search for an adult-sized sweater pattern that needed so little yarn. On Ravelry I found Summer Storm, a free pattern by Heidi Kirmmaier.

I had to do a little fudging around with the sleeves because I had more than enough yarn to knit short sleeves but not enough for the longer sleeves. I compromised and knit them just below my elbows, but it was touch and go. With only one ball of yarn left, I was knitting from both ends of it, working a few rounds on one sleeve and then matching that length on the other one.

Because the design is worked exactly the same front and back, I have my choice as to which side I want to consider the front. To be honest, all that yellow on both sides is not such a flattering color for me, but I can break it up with a scarf around my neck I suppose.

The mail carrier just came with a package that was too large to fix in the box downstairs. I was expecting my copy of 'little red in the city' to arrive today, but I wasn't expecting such a sizeable book! I ordered it after reading so many positive comments about what a good resource it is for sizing a sweater to fit well. I'll be knitting Cria. Ysolda looks delighted with my choice.

summer is coming to an end

2011-08-20T15:07:00.005-04:00

Summer isn't really coming to an end since there's a good month left on the calendar before fall arrives, but my seasonal calendar is affected by the school calendar. When my principal's annual 'welcome back' letter arrives in my mailbox, I really start to feel that vacation is coming to an end.

I spent all of July and the first part of August at home recovering from the foot surgery. I'm doing really well now and have no problems getting out and about as long as I don't try to walk too far in a single day. All the recovery time at home has meant that I have done a lot of knitting along with hours and hours of watching 'Midsomer Murders' episodes on Netflix.

With so much time at home I had been casting on for new projects with abandon, but this past week with the prospect of returning to my teaching job soon, I was rethinking some of the knitting commitments I'd made. A couple of so-so projects got ripped so I can use my time for knitting I'm loving.

Here's a soft and lightweight shawl that practically floats away on its own. The pattern is called Askew because the center line of increases veers off to the left and the two sides are completely asymmetrical.

It's a relaxing knit and doesn't require undivided attention - important when you're trying to catch all the tea-drinking and murder-solving in Midsomer. This project was made doubly wonderful by the yarn I chose for it. If you haven't knit with yarn from The Uncommon Thread, then you might want to treat yourself one day. I used her aptly named 'Heavenly Fingering' in a color she calls 'Nimbostratus'. The shawl takes only one skein, so while the yarn is a luxury yarn this doesn't make for an outrageously expensive knit.

I'm looking forward to wearing this shawl, but not so much that I am wishing for these last days of summer to pass by any more quickly than they're already doing.

'mrs catherine'

2011-07-19T12:08:00.000-04:00

One very rainy summer in the late 1960s, a neighbor gave my mother a brown paper grocery bag full of volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I was about eleven years old and my sister just turning thirteen, so many of the books included in the volumes held no interest for us. And it really must have been a long stretch of rainy weather that led us to pore over the whole bag looking for likely reading material to supplement the bags of books from the public library.

Among such gems as abridged versions of To Kill A Mockingbird and Up From Slavery were two novels that immediately interested my sister and me. Those novels were Mistress of Mellyn and Kirkland Revels by Victoria Holt. If you're not familiar with Victoria Holt, who also wrote as Jean Plaidy and other noms de plume and who produced an incredible amount of writing - most of it historical fiction - then allow me to share a bit.

Beginning with Mistress of Mellyn, my sister and I were captivated by the mildly spooky and broodingly romantic stories of intelligent young women who invariably and quite predictably against their better judgment fell in love with men who were often described by the author as 'sardonic'. At eleven, I wasn't sure exactly what sardonic meant, but it certainly sounded more interesting than anyone I had ever met.

I absolutely loved the clever repartee between the protagonists, and the settings which were often in Cornwall seemed wonderfully exotic while also having the trappings of nineteenth century England.

In short, I had found some mighty good escape reading.

Victoria Holt (aka Jean Plaidy, et al), was very good at description and one scene I can clearly remember from Kirkland Revels details a Christmas celebration during which the female protagonist, Catherine, who is by now pregnant by her short-lived husband who has died under suspicious circumstances, wears a tea gown of 'mole-colored velvet...with ruffles of lime-green lace at the neck'. For those unfamiliar with moles, they're little rodents who come in a variety of shades of grey. So, we are talking grey and lime green here. What a fashion statement over the mulled wine! I was entranced!

Also present at this Christmas dinner is the (sardonic) male protagonist who calls Catherine 'Mrs Catherine' in an attempt to demonstrate familiarity and respect at the same time. He is, of course, in love with Catherine and she is in love with him but, also of course, she does not realize this or admit it to herself until the stakes are as high as the parapet from which her husband is said to have jumped to his untimely death.

By this time, you've either clicked away from this page thinking that I really have given over to complete drivel or are wondering what on earth all this has to do with knitting. Let me tell you.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while I'm knitting or spinning and I wear my old-style iPod nano in a little knitted pouch that hangs from an i-cord around my neck. I've been using the same pouch since my daughter gave me the iPod for Christmas several years ago and it's lately begun fraying from use. When I was digging around in the odd bits of leftover fingering weight yarn, looking for something to knit a new pouch from, I came across a tiny ball of Louet Gems in the color they call Pewter. I suppose some might say that it's 'mole-colored'. Now guess what color my iPod is. I suppose some might say it's 'lime-green'.

I was knitting the pouch and slipped my nano in to check for length. When I saw that bright green next to the grey yarn my first thought was 'it's Mrs Catherine's tea gown!'

Nowadays, I read a pretty wide variety of fiction and nonfiction and I can't say that romance novels figure at all in my book choices. But I'd be lying if I said that I haven't read any Victoria Holt novels since those early days in the 1960s. I ended up buying paperback editions of a number of her books and those books have been traveling with me since the 1970s. Every few years I reread several of the books when I'm craving pure escapism and a soothing trip down memory lane. No sardonicism, either intentional or unintentional, implied.

post-op knitting

2011-07-14T13:30:00.002-04:00

I had surgery on my right foot last week and am now sporting a surgical shoe and metal cane. The surgery went great and I really don't have any significant pain or discomfort. In fact, as I lay in bed reading last night, I was struck by the fact that I was feeling absolutely nothing in my right foot for the first time in a number of years. I'd really put off the surgery which involved removing bone spurs from my big toe joint because of the necessary time spent in recovery. I'm off work until the beginning of September and so this seemed the best time to go ahead and do it. And I'm very glad I did. It was quite luxurious to lie there with two comfortable feet.

I have to wear a rigid surgical shoe for a few more weeks while the incision heals and I did depend on the cane for a few days post surgery. While I was sitting around (and sitting around, and sitting around...) for the first few days, I didn't feel up to much that was challenging mentally or physically, but I just couldn't bring myself to go out in public without yarn bombing the cane a bit.

So, just in time for my first pre-op outing - a visit to the surgeon - I whipped up a few knitted cords with some leftover Noro sock yarn. My doctor's a skilled surgeon with a fantastic bedside manner. She's also a knitter. She noticed. :)

chicks and ducklings or bananas and plantains

2011-07-03T13:17:00.005-04:00

When I first got a big batch of Falkland roving from Cosy many months ago, the colors made me think of baby chicks and ducklings. I spun up all the braids and had a bunch of bobbins full of singles. I finally sat down one day last week to ply all those bobbins into a kind of thick and thin 2-ply yarn. As it happens, while I was busy plying, Cosy was busy giving birth to her beautiful son.

Anyway, once I had a full bobbin of 2-ply, I wound it off onto the skeinwinder and took it over to lay on the kitchen counter ready to set the twist in a good hot water bath. When I glanced up at the fruit bowl, I noticed that the colors in the yarn were very close to the colors of the bananas and plantains in the bowl. So now I don't know whether the yarn reminds me of baby chicks and ducklings or bananas and plantains.

Whatever it reminds me of, there's a lot of it - 833 yards. I knit up a gauge swatch and got 4 stitches to the inch on US 8 needles. The gauge swatch bloomed as a rustic, 'made by loving hands at home' fabric, and I like it. So now I'll be searching Ravelry for a simple sweater pattern that will let this simple yarn speak for itself.

2011-06-17T17:49:00.002-04:00

testing the font. and I'm not quite sure just what happened to the font in the previous post.

a nice stack of daydreams

2011-06-15T16:43:00.015-04:00

I've been very disciplined about knitting from my stash for months and months now. But recently I caved in my commitment not to buy any books for a long while. I'd been daydreaming a lot lately about spinning and dyeing, especially natural plant dyeing.

Facing a housebound summer while I recover from surgery on my right foot, I decided to go ahead and get some new reading material to keep me company. I'll be taking the last three of my post-grad classes - all online since I won't be able to get out and about - but I can knock off the classwork in the mornings and still have the rest of the day to read and knit and watch movies on Netflix. There'll be no spinning on the wheel, but I can work on my spindling skills, too.

Here's part of the reading queue ~

Harvesting Color: How to Find Plants and Make Natural Dyes

Wild Color

The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes

Eco Colour

The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook

Now, right at the top of the stack in the photo is a used copy of an out of print book called Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments and it packs centuries of history into a very small package. A few years ago I read a much longer book about the history of color by Victoria Finlay. The Finlay book has some illustrations but this little book is crammed with them. I'll have to see how the information compares between them.

I was a little sad when I opened the book to see that it was withdrawn from circulation and sold to benefit the branch libraries of the New York City Public Library, my library system. It had been in the collection of the Port Richmond branch on Staten Island. Maybe if it had been in a different branch it might have attracted more attention. Its cover alone is very eye-catching.

I'm in no position to be set up a dye kitchen. With four adults in one apartment, there just isn't the space. But like I said, it's daydreaming I've been doing. I'll just be a much more well-informed daydreamer after this summer's reading, and I can always plan ahead for the day when I will have the chance to put my new knowledge into practice.

(6/17/2011) edited to add: I'm about halfway through the small book on dyes and pigments. Finlay's book goes into much more detail about the colors and how they were developed, as well as their significance, but the small book is far better for illustrations. In fact, Finlay lists this book in her bibliography. I'm glad to have both.

spring to summer shawl

2011-05-30T15:42:00.009-04:00

Digging deep into the stash cupboard a few weeks ago I came up with five balls Tahki Chelsea Silk, a now discontinued 85% silk, 15% wool aran weight yarn. Having knit a couple of simple garter stitch triangle shawls with other odd amounts of yarn, I thought I'd try making another - this one with a contrasting border - and to try my hand at creating a subtle little waviness at the edge.

A couple of inches shy of the bind off, I increased across one row and this did cause the shawl to have a bit of a ruffle when it was bound off.

Alas, after washing and blocking the shawl all hints of the ruffle appear to have been completely flattened. I am undaunted, however, and as it seems I do not get tired of knitting garter stitch triangles, I will try again with a different formula of increases.

First, though, I think I'll make a Rock Island shawl and celebrate the approaching end of my classes!

oh, well

2011-04-22T17:42:00.004-04:00

Knitting and blocking all finished and then , as I'm sewing in the ends, I spot it - one rather glaring mistake.

In the middle of the baby-sized Stylish Squares blanket, some stitches seem to have gotten confused for a little while only to straighten themselves out by the end of that particular square.

All in all, the little blanket is very nice and I don't think the meandering stitches will make anyone lose sleep. I'm sure there'll be other things that will have folks awake in the wee hours, but I'm fairly confident that it won't be the errant stitches.

'knitting kites'

2011-03-27T10:54:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago when I was blocking the third of four shawls that have come off the needles lately, my husband joked about my knitting another kite. He knows they're shawls because he sees me wearing them, not flying them, but I think he was pointing out that shawls are pretty much all I've been knitting for weeks and weeks now.

This is true and may be partly because I joined the '11 Shawls in 2011' group on Ravelry, although I think I joined the group because I was already in the mood for lots of shawl knitting, especially small shawls.

I know there's another shawl just waiting to be cast on but I am turning to a couple of other projects before I start another 'kite'. Digging deep into the stash, I pulled out six balls of a creamy white Debbie Bliss Merino DK that I bought more than ten years ago.

With so much of my brainpower being used up at work and in my classes, I am choosing another simple project for this wool. It's Susan Hanlon's Stylish Squares blanket. The design is for an adult sized blanket knit in an Aran weight wool, but I'm going to see if I can't eke out a baby sized blanket with the six balls of the DK.

This now-discontinued yarn can still be found in knitters' stashes on Ravelry, so if push comes to shove, I will try to buy or trade for some more. I've really been trying to knit from the stash, though, so I hope what I have will be enough.

I laid out this shawl to block this morning. It's another very simple project based on the Garter Stitch Triangle and I used very plain undyed wool for the body and some Alfa for the attached i-cord.

With March going out like a lion here in NYC, I can probably get some wear out of this one before more springlike weather takes hold.

a little knitting, lots of work

2011-03-12T16:06:00.002-05:00

I'm still knitting while working and studying but have pared my works in progress down to three very simple projects. I finished the Herbivore and while I love the texture of the Fleece Artist Sea Wool, I do wish that the color variation in the dyeing were just a little more subtle. I like the bluer purple tones more than the reddish tones. Still, it feels just lovely and the pattern is nice and simple.

oren

2011-02-12T16:24:00.005-05:00

Another small shawl to keep my shoulders warm at work, Oren is a lovely pattern to knit. It's well-written and the lace design becomes very intuitive, making this shawl a very relaxing knit. I used a bit less than two full skeins of Louet Gems fingering weight yarn that I had in my stash.

The colorway is #80 Pewter, a lovely warm grey.

I've been very quiet on the blog these last months because the demands of my teaching job are keeping me very busy all week, and weekends pass in a blur. Life will become a bit busier over the next nine months or so as I take post-graduate courses in education to complete my thirty credits beyond the master's degree. This is one of the very few ways a public school teacher in NYC can earn a salary increase outside of contractual increases - something that is unlikely to happen any time soon in the 'current economic climate'. We are currently working under a contract that expired well over a year ago, and the mayor is unlikely to agree to a new contract that includes any rise in salary.

As I take the long view of the upcoming decade of my life, I am, as my mother used to say, 'getting my ducks in a row.' Retirement from teaching will happen at some point in the next ten years. If all goes well, it will happen at the earlier side of the decade or at the midpoint rather than at the end, so I really do need to buckle down and finish up these credits. I had started on earning them shortly after completing my master's degree in 1996, but then I got sidetracked and stopped after earning ten credits.

As I work and study, I will certainly also be knitting and spinning but I may be very quiet here. I will try to post at least once a month - what happened to January? - if only to put up a picture or two with a link to a knitted project that I think other knitters might enjoy making.

So wish me luck as I sharpen my pencils and prepare to begin the first three (edited on sunday morning, 2/13, to add: make that FOUR classes - just registered for an online course. in for a penny, in for a pound) classes this semester!

(a little bit of interesting information about the shawl name: according to Wikipedia, 'oren' is Hebrew for pine or ash and is a male name used in the Old Testament)

simple lines in not so simple times

2010-12-28T13:42:00.006-05:00

Since finishing the Damson, I've been looking for another small shawl pattern with the same kind of clean and simple lines. I love to knit lace but lately I've been drawn more to designs that have a geometric quality to them. I came across the Ravelry page for Stephen West's Herbivore shawl while looking at projects that were made with Fleece Artist Sea Wool.

I have two skeins of that yarn in the Plum colorway and was looking for a project for it. I saw a few Traveling Woman shawls and I do like that pattern and have it in my library, but I was looking for something even less 'lacy' than that. When I saw the Herbivore shawl I felt that it was perfect for the yarn and for my knitting mood right now.

I'm on winter break for another week or so and want to use some of that time to plan new projects for the long winter ahead. I've got wool and the pattern for the Vine Yoke Cardigan so this might be a good time to cast on for that.

This past week, I finished two more ribbed watch caps for charity. And I knocked off a couple of Thermis neckwarmers for my daughter and myself. Wool and buttons for both came from the stash as I've been serious about working my way through the yarn cupboard.

Hers is in teal and mine is a pinky red one that's still waiting to dry so I can sew on the (to me) pleasingly mismatched buttons.

I just love these beautifully simple buttons.

oh, froggie went a'ripping

2010-12-05T15:12:00.007-05:00

So I'm back to knitting a couple of caps for soldiers, and that's just fine. I've enjoyed knitting this pattern, although I have modified the decrease method to suit myself. But between the first ten I knit and the current one on needles, I knit myself the Damson, managing to eke out almost the entire shawl with the single skein of the madelinetosh Pashmina. Almost.

I was halfway through the last row when the yarn gave out, but I had been noticing just how similar the colorway of the Pashmina was to a skein of Koigu KPM that has been in my stash for a very long time, so long that the yarn tag is lost. Held side by side in natural light the two colors were virtually indistinguishable and the difference in weight looked negligible enough for me to pick up with the Koigu and finish off the row and the bind off.

In the photo, you may be able to see more of a difference but I can promise you that in real life, it's impossible to detect. So I didn't have to buy another skein of the Pashmina just to get a few yards, however I consider myself very lucky to have had a dead ringer yarn right in my stash.

To make up for the difference in weight (Pashmina is sportweight and the Koigu is fingering), I relaxed my knitting a lot and bound off as loosely as I could.

After I finished the Damson and before I started back on the cap knitting, I dug out the Garter Rib Socks that had been sitting around since summer. I wasn't too far along in the knitting before I had started thinking that the gauge was mighty loose, but I kept plowing along. Today I decided that it was silly to continue and ripped that sock out just shy of turning the heel.

I also ripped out the few rows of the Koigu Linen Stitch Scarf that I had (grudgingly) knitted. I just really was not enjoying that project. There was something about having to cut the yarn at the end of each row and tie on the yarn for the next row that was making me fidgety. It just seemed like a lot of fussing for a bit of knitting pleasure. I do have to thank this project, though, for making me dig through my stash of Koigu. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had the skein that matches the Pashmina so nicely sitting right in front of me on my work table.

I came close to ripping out the other two socks that I have had on needles for what feels like forever. One is a few inches from the toe-shaping but the other one is just past the cuff. And I still have their mates to knit! Maybe with the ever so baggy Garter Rib Sock and the fiddly Linen Stitch Scarf gone, I'll be more in the mood to pick them up and finish them and their mates. We'll see. If not, Froggie will be coming for them, too.

renewing more than the library books

2010-11-14T09:24:00.009-05:00

Every fall I experience a few weeks of slowdown in my other life activities as I get back into my teaching routine, but this year the period of readjustment has gone on and on. I am beginning to realize that this may simply prove to be one of those years when the frustrations outnumber the satisfactions. I've realized that I have to find a way through the fog of fatigue and get back fully to my knitting and spinning and reading before any more time slips by.

The first couple of months of work I was busy knitting all those caps, but once I'd finished them I felt a bit stuck. I picked up the boring but soothing sofa blanket and finished it, knitting on it in the evenings after work, sometimes with my eyes closed and my head leaning against the back of the chair, my fingers working those repetitive stitches on their own.

With the blanket finished, I was left with nothing on the needles but the same three pair of socks I've been looking at for months. With plenty of knitted socks already, no one around here is feeling a sense of urgency that I finish these, so of course neither am I.

When I walk my dog I like to wear fingerless mitts and I do have a couple of pairs of these, but I knitted them according to the patterns and they fit me a little loosely. I poked through the baskets of small amounts of wool that I have and found two balls of Noro Kureyon in the same colorway. I'm not sure which one it is as the labels are missing but I suspect it's a discontinued colorway since I've had this yarn in my stash for quite a while.

I cast on for the Maine Morning Mitts using a smaller needle than called for to tighten up the gauge for my smallish hands. I also added some length to them so they cover my arms well past my wrists. These are a relaxing project to work on while drinking my morning coffee or taking a break at work over a quick lunch.

This is my favorite time of year for walking my dog. We both enjoy the crisp, dry air and I love the colors of the leaves. For a few weeks I was taking shorter walks since I have been so tired, but then it occurred to me that autumn will soon pass and it'll be another year before we have this weather and the colors to enjoy. The last couple of weeks I've been pushing myself to walk farther and stay out longer, and the result has been that I have actually felt more energetic and less stressed. I can forget about work for a while and simply enjoy being outdoors with my little dog (with my knitted mitts on my hands!).

My classroom can get very hot, so I haven't been wearing sweaters to work so much. But I need something on my shoulders to keep the chill off when walking through the drafty halls and stairways of the very old school building where I work. I've been using my smaller shawls a lot over long-sleeved tee shirts.

With this in mind, I have started a Damson with a skein of madelinetosh Pashmina in the color Vintage Frame, which shows up as very beige in the photo but is actually more of a silvery taupe. It's a color that reminds me of some of the stones I found on the beach in New Brunswick this past summer.

Damson is a pattern that is pretty but fairly plain, not requiring too much brain power to knit, but working it in a beautiful yarn like the Pashmina elevates it to a very satisfying place!

I picked up this yarn as an impulse purchase when I went to the yarn store to get some more wool to knit the watch caps for the soldiers. It's a fairly pricey yarn and I didn't have a specific project in mind, so I only bought the one skein. It's not going to be enough to knit the whole shawl, but I am thinking I'll use two different colors for this project. The shawl is divided between a garter stitch section and a stockinette lace section, and I think a color change will work.

Searching through pages of projects on Ravelry to see if anyone else has used two different colors, I came across a couple of Damsons knitted this way. I like the way they look, so I will be going back to the yarn store to find another skein of the Pashmina in a color that works well with the Vintage Frame. Checking under the sofa cushions for the odd bit of spare change to float this purchase but not having much luck there.

I had cancelled my reservations for the Rhinebeck weekend and drove up from the city for the day on Sunday only. What I saved in expenses of two nights away from home I was able to put towards purchasing two Cotswold fleeces from one of the breeders who was showing some of her ewes that weekend.

I had a long conversation with the breeder as she was waiting for the judging to begin and was able to visit with her beautiful sheep. She sent me samples from seven of the fleeces from their latest shearing and I chose two. As it happens, the fleeces come from two ewes who are sisters born a year apart. One is a twin and the other a triplet. The breeder also sent me a photograph of the sire. It's lovely to know so much about the sheep whose fleeces I'll be spinning over the next year.

When my work threatens to overwhelm me with its constant frustrations I have to remind myself that - among many other blessings - I have my knitting and my spinning and the public library with its endless resources to help me find my balance again. It's impossible to put a price on that.

that's it for the caps

2010-10-19T16:32:00.005-04:00

These are the last of the caps that I'll be knitting for now. Two were for my own kids and the other eight will be on their way to the military base at Bagram, Afghanistan for delivery by Thanksgiving.

There's not much to say about them since they were all knit using the same pattern that I modified in exactly the same way for each one. The only difference was the wool I used. The first four were knit with Patons Classic Wool, the next two with Plymouth Galway, and the last couple with Cascade 220.

I quite liked the Patons for this project and would probably give it a slight edge over the other two for knitting these caps. It felt sturdy enough to withstand the kind of less-than-delicate treatment the caps will probably be subjected to, but still nice and soft so as not to be scratchy on the foreheads and ears of soldiers who might not have grown up wearing nice, woolly caps knitted by their moms or grandmothers.

Now that this project is completed, I almost don't know what to do with myself. For the time being, I'll be picking up the socks and blanket that have been on needles for weeks and weeks while I mull over what the next big and absorbing project will be.

stepping back

2010-09-26T16:15:00.002-04:00

Taking a bit of a break from the blog as I get back into my teaching year and write some grant proposals and new curriculum. Spinning and knitting goes on. See you when things settle back into a more relaxed rhythm~

cap knitting

2010-09-06T14:33:00.005-04:00

I'm still knitting those caps I wrote about in the previous post. I finished four of them for the soldiers and they've been washed and blocked and are now packed up and ready to send to CoggieTM.

My son and daughter like these caps a lot so I'm knitting one in the light grey for my son right now since he's home for a break. I'll finish this one in the next day or two and then get started on another dark grey one for my daughter. Then I'm going to work on a couple more for the soldiers during my lunch breaks over the next few weeks.

I can't recall ever knitting any single pattern so many times in succession, but I've found all this cap knitting to be relaxing. And the yarn I've been using, Patons Classic Wool, is a real pleasure. It's sturdy but soft and is a real bargain.

What's also good about the cap knitting is that it's pretty automatic so my mind is free to think about other things I'll be knitting once I've finished all the caps - like what sweater I'm going to make with all my handspun Romney.

keep your head warm

2010-08-27T16:51:00.004-04:00

When I heard about an effort to knit 210 caps for the soldiers who are stationed at Bagram in Afghanistan, I didn't hesitate to pick up the wool and needles.

These caps are for the soldiers to wear at night to keep their heads warm while they're trying to get a good night's sleep. The person who organized this effort would like to send two caps to each soldier - one to wear while the other is drying after it's been hand-washed. Her husband is a sergeant at the base and assures her that the soldiers are very used to hand-washing articles of clothing.

I'm using the recommended cap pattern, but I modified the decrease method to keep the 6x2 ribbing all the way up to the top of the crown.

A disclaimer here - the cap has not been washed and blocked yet. I had to get my son to model the cap for me before he heads back to college tomorrow for his very last semester.

If you'd be interested in participating in this effort, check out the group for the High Fiber Diet Podcast on Ravelry and send a PM to Coggie. The goal is to send the caps by mid-November so they can be distributed to the soldiers by Thanksgiving.

My hope is that, very soon, the soldiers can be wearing these caps back in their own hometowns to do things like hike in the woods and build snowmen with their kids.

spinning ripe bananas

2010-08-14T18:28:00.009-04:00

When the second installment of cosymakes' farm wool fiber club arrived, I showed my husband the braid of roving and told him that the colorway was called 'ripe bananas'. He looked at me a little funny until I reminded him about red bananas and then it made sense to him.

photo from 'Useful of Banana' blog by Julong

I found this photo of red bananas in Google Images and it's from a blog by someone in Thailand. I looked for contact information to ask permission to use the photo but couldn't find anything. I don't want to take credit for the photo, so check the info just under it for a link to the blog.

While looking for information about banana varieties, I was amazed to learn that there are over 1,ooo different types of bananas in the world. The ubiquitous yellow Cavendish, found in the produce section of supermarkets all across North America, is a pale companion to many more colorful varieties.

Here are a couple of photos I can take credit for. First is the fiber before spinning after I fluffed it open a bit widthwise and the yarn I spun from it, which I'm going to leave as a singles.

Now, all the fibers in this club have a bit more vegetable matter in them than some spinners might like to deal with. It is, after all, a farm wool fiber club. The 'vm' doesn't bother me and I just pick out bits as I work through the length of the braid, opening it up in preparation for spinning. Any small amounts left in I can just let fall out or pick out as I'm spinning. I have to pause anyway to move the yarn up and down the hooks on the flyer, so it's fine.

But about those colors, which I really love. When I first opened the package, my thoughts didn't go to red bananas but to a Vermeer painting that I saw some years ago when the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the 'Vermeer and the Delft School' exhibit.

One of Vermeer's earliest paintings is 'Diana and Her Companions' and I love the rich colors of the subjects' clothing, especially the figure at the bottom right of the painting with the gorgeous copper and burgundy tones of her dress. The colors in this painting are some of my favorites. I think the 'ripe bananas' colorway would fit right in.

Diana and Her Companions by Johannes Vermeer

souvenirs

2010-08-13T12:08:00.005-04:00

When I travel I don't ordinarily make a point of scouting out yarn shops in the cities or towns I stay in or pass through. This trip to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, though, was different. Along with the hiking and the coastal drives that we planned, I set out - on the recommendations of a friend - with a couple of places in mind.

One of them, London-Wul near Moncton, NB, was closed both days that we found ourselves in the area. It just worked out that on both legs of the journey, we were in or near Moncton on the only day of the week that the shop is not open. I guess I'll just have to go back.

The other place that my friend recommended is Gaspereau Valley Fibres in Wolfville, NS and I made a special effort to be in the area just to visit this place. I am so glad that I did. If you ever happen to find yourself on the north coast of Nova Scotia, I can promise that you will not be disappointed if you make this place one of your destinations.

The owner has a small flock of Cotswolds which are a heritage breed and they are considered endangered. I was able to buy a small amount of washed fleece from her sheep as well as some skeins of her River Road Wool Farm yarn in a beautiful dark lavender.

I found a wool blanket from MacAusland's Woollen Mill in the shop that was just exactly what I was hoping to find during this trip. It's woven in natural shades of cream and light grey and is the size called a 'napper'. It is now folded up on my sofa ready to be used when the temperature finally calls for a blanket while napping.

Since I live in Manhattan and we are not hurting for yarn shops here (not to mention that I really am knitting from my stash these days) I didn't set out to buy yarn or notions that I could find here. But then I spotted the Fleece Artist and Koigu yarns and chose a couple skeins each of Sea Wool and Koigu KPPM in colors that remind me of places and things my husband and I had seen during our drives along the New Brunswick coast and through much of Nova Scotia.

Two other fibery places we happened to come across along the way were the Lismore Sheep Farm in River John, NS, where I bought 12 ounces of roving from their Dorset sheep, and Bellemeade Farm in Mabou, NS. Bellemeade is a working dairy farm as well as a sheep farm and they raise Border Leicesters under the watchful eye of Ned, the donkey. According to the young woman in the shop, Ned is a very good donkey even if he's not a completely reliable guard donkey for the sheep.

The wool from the Bellemeade sheep is sent to a mill on Prince Edward Island and is spun into a beautiful light worsted weight two-ply yarn. I bought a few skeins in natural shades of grey and cream, but they have beautiful dyed colors, as well. Unfortunately, their webpage doesn't show the full range of their colors, and afterwards I regretted not buying some of the color that was almost exactly like the orangey-yellow lichen that I saw on rocks in coastal Maine, in the woods in different places and on the huge granite outcroppings at Peggy's Cove. So I guess I'll just have to go back there, too.

Until I can go back, I'll enjoy my wooly souvenirs from a wonderful vacation.

new brunswick and nova scotia: all this and so much more

2010-08-11T13:37:00.019-04:00

off to Nova Scotia

2010-07-27T22:13:00.004-04:00

The maps we're using for the road trip were published a bit more recently than this one. See you in a week or two!

one little button

2010-07-25T12:23:00.003-04:00

Twenty-three years ago, I was living in a fourth-floor walk up apartment with my husband, our young daughter and new baby son. Our upstairs neighbor was a single mother whose daughter was a couple of years older than my own little girl. Phyllis was a very skilled seamstress and worked freelance day and night doing things as intricate as hand-applying thousands of beads to a wedding dress or as mundane as altering trousers.

Phyllis sewed all her own and her daughter's clothes and handed down a number of things to my daughter including a small version of the prairie dress. This dress got worn until it was outgrown by my daughter. I carefully removed the beautiful enameled button in the shape of a pansy that Phyllis had sewn at the neckline and replaced it with a different button before passing the dress along to another little girl.

Phyllis and her daughter moved away and we lost touch, but that little button stayed in my button stash year after year.

This past week, I started knitting the Baby Belle cardigan, using some of the yarn that I'm knitting my Garter Yoke Cardigan with and small amounts of stash yarns. Looking at the combination of the colors, I remembered the little pansy button.

I don't have a baby girl who can wear this sweater, but I'm putting it away for a time when I will. My own children will eventually have children of their own, I assume, since my daughter and her longtime boyfriend talk about 'when' they have kids, not 'if' they do.

Anyway, it's a sweet little knit and was fun to make, and I'm happy to finally have found a place for the button.

complementary knitting and baking

2010-07-21T10:06:00.010-04:00

After I cast on for several new projects with yarn that had been deep in my stash, I was struck by how all the colors work so well together. I had not consciously pulled these yarns out of the cupboard with this in mind, but since I've mostly been knitting monogamously for many months now it could be that I am simply in the mood for these rich, deep colors. And transitioning from one project to another doesn't feel like an interruption of that mood.

The different yarns are Jamieson's Soft Shetland in Loganberry, Manos del Uruguay's Wool Clasica in Wildflowers, Sundara's Sock Yarn in Poppy, and Mountain Colors' Weaver's Wool Quarters in Pheasant. The Jamieson's and the Manos yarns have been in my stash for at least eleven years and it's high time they were allowed to come out and play, don't you think?

Even my baking this week seemed to carry out the theme as this peach and blueberry cobbler continued the mood for ripe and juicy colors. The knitting's been going pretty fast lately; the cobbler went even faster.

big fat needles

2010-07-12T12:45:00.003-04:00

This pattern is called Tank Top and one would think that means it's a summery knit, but it's not. This is a vest and is knit in a super bulky wool. I happen to have a number of balls of the wool, Rowan Big Wool, in my stash so I decided to make this vest as a very quick knit.

At 2 stitches to the inch, the gauge is as big as anything I've ever knitted and this knit is giving my right arm a workout as I have to lift high to get this big, fat yarn wrapped around the big, fat needles.

a slice of lemon or an omelette?

2010-07-08T17:37:00.007-04:00

I left the 'Citron' blocking this morning and went downtown to run some errands. While browsing in the bookstore, I pulled a copy of Elizabeth David's classic, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, off the shelf. I was struck by how much the omelette in the painting on the cover looks like my shawl.

I have this book in my kitchen library, although not with this richly eggy cover. David devotes several pages to egg dishes, but she wrote just as much about lemons and here's a bit of what she has to say about the bright and lovely fruit:

'In 1533 the Company of Leathersellers offered Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn a

great banquet to celebrate Anne's coronation on Whit Sunday in Westminster Hall.

Among the princely luxuries that graced the feast was one lemon, one only, for which

the Leathersellers had paid six silver pennies.'

from 'I'll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon'

Wine and Food Magazine, February/March 1969

This wildly expensive lemon doesn't seem to have offered any special protection to Anne, as she didn't last very long as queen, but that's not really the lemon's fault now, is it?

brandywine

2010-07-05T13:06:00.004-04:00

The Brandywine Shawl is a doubly good knit. First, the pattern is so well-written and the charts so clear that knitting it is a pleasure. Second, Rosemary Hill offers this pattern for sale as a means of raising money for the Haitian earthquake relief fund.

Many designers and crafters answered the call to donate part of their profits in the days and weeks following the earthquake. I could be wrong, but I believe most are not still channeling funds in that direction. I'm not here to say whether or not they should be, but I do think it's worth noting that Rosemary is still sending $5 of the $6.50 purchase price of this pattern to Doctors Without Borders.

As of mid-June, she had sent $12,500 of her $50,000 goal to DWB.

So, if you're casting about for a new shawl pattern, why not try the Brandywine? There are at least two good reasons why you should.

a slice of 'citron' with that iced tea

2010-07-04T09:24:00.005-04:00

Summer knitting is going great, the Brandywine Shawl is completed and blocking, and I'm on to a new lace project, the Citron Shawl. I'm using a merino laceweight yarn that I originally bought to knit a different shawl but I changed my mind on that one and used another laceweight instead.

This sunny yellow yarn, from Wooly Wonka Fibers, has been in my stash for several years just waiting for the appropriate project. I don't usually wear yellow and had even considered overdyeing the yarn to tone it down a bit, but I couldn't bring myself to mess with the very pretty work done by the dyer. She called this colorway - one of two colorways dyed especially for Anne Hanson's Bee Fields Shawl - 'Buckwheat Honey', but it's always made me think of lemons. 'Citron' is French for lemon, of course, and you can't get much more summery than that.

The Citron Shawl is wildly popular, with thousands of knitters on Ravelry having queued it, knitted it or currently working on it, and I can see why. As shawl knitting goes, it's very straightforward and uncomplicated and gives a result that's something different from the usual triangle. I started it early this morning while I was having my first cup of coffee and quickly got well into the first section of the shawl body.

I don't really need to use stitch markers with this pattern since they only mark the 3-stitch garter borders at each edge, but for this project I brought out these from my collection. I'm a minimalist when it comes to wearing jewelry but I do like letting my knitting wear jewelry like these pretty things from SeeJayneKnit.

I enjoy choosing stitch markers that coordinate with the yarn I'm using in a project. The eye pleasing combination of yarn and stitch markers are a guilt free indulgence in beauty for a small investment. If you go to Jayne's Etsy shop and take a look, you may well find yourself adding to your own collection. Consider yourself warned.

summer vacation begins with blocking

2010-06-29T16:09:00.004-04:00

Perhaps predictably, the Nordique Swing is not finished by my self-imposed deadline, but I do have a good reason. It takes lots of time and space to block a bunch of sweater pieces, and for the past couple of weeks neither of these has been in abundant supply. But my teaching job is over for the summer and today was my first day at home with both time and space on my hands.

For me, blocking a larger project is best done on a weekday when everyone else has gotten out of the house early, the whole day stretches out with lots of drying time, and no one will be wanting to go have a lie-down on my bed - the only available space I have right now with both kids home and occupying their own rooms. But now the blocking is done, and by the end of this week the pieces should be sewn up and I should be well into knitting the collar and button and buttonhole bands. I'm not making any promises, though. Who knows what other distractions the summer days might bring?

While waiting for a chance to block the Nordique, I've been doing a lot spinning and have made progress on the Brandywine Shawl, which has the added appeal of being a project that will require no sewing up beyond weaving in a couple of yarn ends!

all in pieces

2010-06-10T15:27:00.004-04:00

I haven't really thought much about whether I'm a process knitter or a product knitter. I love to knit and I love to wear what I knit or to see my knitting go to others. It's all good to me.

When it comes to the Nordique Swing, however, I'm thinking that - for this particular project, at least - I'm a process knitter.

I got the hang of the wheat ear lace pattern pretty quickly and zipped right through the back, the two fronts, and now I'm knitting both sleeves at the same time on two separate circular needles.

But now it seems that I'm slowing down a bit as I near the end. Could it be that it's starting to dawn on me just how much seaming is involved with this garment? I mean, there are all those individually knit up pieces that will have to be sewn together to make a sweater.

Now, I do know how to sew up my knitting and I've done it before plenty of times. I just don't really enjoy doing it and usually look for ways to avoid it. Even with the Nordique Swing, I modified the pattern and used short rows for shoulder shaping and left the stitches live so I can work a 3-needle bind off and not sew shoulder seams.

I know there are lots of knitters who like sewing up their knitting, and I even call some of them friends. But, really, I'd rather be knitting than sewing up my knitting and that's simply my preference. If I wanted to sew, I'd be cutting out fabric pieces and stitching them together.

So why did I choose to knit a sweater that obviously involves a good amount of sewing up? Well, I liked the look of the garment and I had lots of a yarn that is a great substitute for the yarn called for by the designer. In short, I was thinking as a process knitter. It seems, though, that I conveniently shoved out of my conscious thoughts that, in this case, sewing up is actually part of the process.

I'm determined that this sweater will not end up all in pieces and in a bag, only to become one of those projects that I start making old year's resolutions about. You know, where you vow that you'll finish all UFOs by the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve?

My last day of teaching for this school year is June 28th. I'm going to vow that the Nordique will be finished - sewn up and blocked - by the 27th. I'm just going to think as a product knitter and get it done.

28 years

2010-06-05T15:12:00.006-04:00

2 children

4 apartments

4 jobs

2 cars

3 cats

1 dog

2 trips to Disney World

many road trips

countless knitted socks

a few tears

lots of laughs

28 Junes

1 marriage

when it's too hot to think, we weave

2010-06-04T17:51:00.015-04:00

my fourth graders weaving with my handspun yarn. fiber from the hello yarn fiber club 2007. click on the photos for a bigger view. :)

pattern is ready. pattern writer? not so much

2010-05-25T18:20:00.007-04:00

Okay, so I finally have the mug mat pattern formatted as a pdf. I was waiting for a chance to get a couple of photos. Now I have the pdf saved on my computer and I haven't been able to figure out where to go from there.

I've searched Blogger Help for assistance in creating a pdf link in the sidebar. I've requested help on a Ravelry group for blog writers and am waiting for some help from that talented group.

In the meantime, here's a photo showing one side of the Reversible Mug Mat.

Edited to add: thanks to this kind Raveler, the pattern is now available on the sidebar as a free pdf and on Ravelry as a free download.

a somewhat original pattern

2010-05-06T18:02:00.002-04:00

When you have a couple of drawers full of handknitted socks you also tend to have a bag or two full of leftover sock yarn. If you're not inclined to knit a sock yarn blanket, like some very dedicated souls, you may find yourself wondering what to do with all those bits and bobs.

I started to knit a few mug mats, or coasters, with some of my leftovers and then I decided to write down what I was doing so I could share it with my knitting group.

The result is that I've written a very, very simple and straightforward mug mat pattern. It's been fun to keep notes on how much yarn I was using - my method involved using a small clamp on the length of yarn every time I measured off three more yards as a kind of marker - and to test different needle sizes and weights of sock yarn.

Now that I've written the pattern as a document, complete with a little copyright symbol at the bottom of each page, it seems a bit pretentious to treat it as if it's an original idea. Still, I've seen some pretty simple patterns for scarves, say, that are little more than a long rectangular repeat of stitch patterns that can be found in Barbara Walker's Treasuries or other stitch dictionaries.

What I think entitles the pattern writers to claim a copyright is the same thing that has made me claim it. I've calculated yarn requirements and gauge, and I've made notes that I think might be helpful to anyone wanting to knit my mug mat pattern.

I don't plan to sell the pattern. I'm giving it away to my knitting group members and I'm going to figure out how to create a PDF document so I can put it here on this page as a free pattern for my blog readers. While it's not anything that will cause knitters to put down their needles and shout, "Wow, what an amazing mug mat!", it can't hurt to have another simple little pattern out there for when you just want to use up a bit of sock yarn.

knitcroblo7: day 7 - 'a particular yarn'

2010-05-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

I've come across some really wonderful yarns over the years, but I'm not going to talk about those. Instead, I'm going to write about my own humble 4-ply worsted weight yarn.

This is the yarn I mentioned in yesterday's post about my new lazy kate.

I could see that it was plying just lovely, but I was anxious to get a bit of it washed and then to knit up a swatch and wash and block that. The yarn knit up at 17 stitches to 4 inches (4.25 stitches per inch), a perfect weight for a nice, warm sweater for next fall and winter.

I know this yarn doesn't really look like much to write home about, but I feel inordinately proud of it. I think it's a bit like the first time you bake bread.

There's a great deal of satisfaction when you take those simple, basic loaves from the oven and give their bottoms that satisfying little thump. Come to think of it, I feel that way every time I bake bread, so maybe it's a feeling that never grows old.

So I think my yarn is like those loaves of bread, solid and reliable, something I'm happy to turn to when cake and art yarn feel a little too rich.

knitcroblo6: day 6 - opting for the wild card

2010-05-01T12:28:00.002-04:00

Today's blog post topic is 'revisiting a finished object', but since we're allowed to substitute the wild card topic on any given day of blog week, I'm taking that option in today's post. The wild card topic is 'a favorite tool or piece of equipment'.

I recently bought a lazy kate that has changed my spinning for the better. It's the Kate 45 and it's wonderful. Sounds a bit like an infomercial, but it's true.

In October I bought a Romney fleece at Rhinebeck, dropped it off with the lovely people from Still River Mill for processing and in January received 4 bags full of beautifully prepared pin-drafted roving. So far, I'm halfway through spinning this fiber.

Once I had four bobbins full of singles, I started thinking that I'd really like to make a 4-ply yarn with it and knit a really warm sweater to wear to Rhinebeck next October. I had heard about the Kate 45 and how it holds the bobbins at a 45 degree angle, eliminating the need to put any tension on the bobbins when plying. I did a google search and located the vendor's Etsy shop. She not only sells these lazy kates but also hand-dyed spinning fibers and yarns.

I sat down yesterday afternoon when I got home from work and plied up five skeins of 4-ply yarn. No tangles, no hassles. Just lovely, soft and evenly plied worsted weight yarn.

I've got a new favorite piece of equipment.

knitcroblo5: day 5 - where I knit

2010-04-30T06:00:00.000-04:00

I knit in lots of places. Mostly I knit at home in a comfortable chair in my living room.

I belong to a knitting group that meets about once a month, and I love hanging out with my fellow knitters. We get together in different locations around the city, and in the warm months we gather in parks and sit on the grass. I love that.

Like many knitters, I knit on the subway, on buses, in waiting rooms, in airports - just about anywhere.

Of all the places I knit, though, perhaps the most significant place is my classroom. I've been teaching elementary school, mostly fourth grade, for many years and for most of those years, I've been teaching my students how to knit. I start off by teaching the whole class to weave on simple peg looms and once they've gotten going with that, I begin taking very small groups of 2 or 3 aside and I teach them how to knit.

Once or twice over the years I've had a student who, after learning, has decided that knitting's not for him or her, and I always allow those students to pursue their own interests while the rest of the class knits. The rest, though, are mad about it. It's as if, having gotten a feel for wool and needles in their hands, they cannot stay away from it.

Every single free moment in my classroom finds the kids heading for the 'wool table' and their baskets of projects. Their love of handling the fiber has lately taken my current group of students in a direction that I didn't anticipate.

They've become crazy about braiding! Our classroom is literally festooned with woolly braids hanging from just about every possible spot. The whole thing started when one of the girls showed me a braided bracelet she had made and I suggested she teach the others.

And now, except for one boy who prefers to read his science books and work out the Sieve of Eratosthenes, the whole class is wild for braiding. No hard feelings against the non-knitter, however. After all, he is interested in such things as the physical properties of wool and the mechanics of spinning wool into yarn.

It feels good to pass along a personal passion to a new generation. I know that relatively few of my students will keep up their knitting once they move on from my class. But that's okay. I also know that they have a skill now that they didn't have before they came to me, and maybe somewhere down the road, they will pick it up again.

Recently, I got an email from a former fourth grade student. He wrote:

"I randomly remembered your email recently when a friend of mine was upset that her knitted teddy bear was torn. I told her that I'd learned to knit in fourth grade and could fix it. I just thought you'd like to know how far your fiber traditions [his words, not mine I assure you] have traveled. I'm currently a junior at the University of Florida, but I still remember my fourth grade year and how much fun we had."

Pretty cool to hear after so many years.

Earth Day yarn braid by fourth grader Lauren P.

knitcroblo4: day 4 - 'a new skill'

2010-04-29T06:00:00.002-04:00

Today's topic is a tough one for me because I feel like there are so many skills that I would like to learn or to learn to do better.

Maybe the skill that I should focus on is the one that I have so persistently avoided learning for a long time -namely, toe up sock knitting. I know, I know. Toe up socks are the bomb. Many of my knitting friends and acquaintances wouldn't think of knitting a cuff down sock anymore now that they've seen the light.

I don't really know what's holding me back. I even have Wendy Johnson's excellent book as a reference. I have the support of countless internet resources. What's the matter with me?

Could be I've been knitting socks so comfortably from the cuff down for so many years that I've gotten in a rut. The problem with that line of thinking is that I don't really knit very many 'plain vanilla' socks, and there are many very interesting and challenging sock patterns that are cuff down construction, not really a rut if you think about it. Every time I decide that it's time to buckle down and learn that toe up cast on and practice, practice, practice, I'm distracted by a sock design that only requires skills I already have.

Then again, there was that interview with Cookie A. (and I don't think anybody would say that she is a boring, stuck-in-a-rut sock knitter) that I heard on a podcast a few months ago where she was explaining why she prefers cuff down construction. She said that she often designs as she's knitting and can do this better while working downward in the design. But, yeah, then again, I'm not the one designing the socks, so that rationale doesn't really work for me, does it?

So I'll just plan that sometime over my summer break, I will at least learn this toe up cast on method. The problem - it's beginning to become clearer to me - is that this is all starting to sound like a bit of a chore. Not really what I'm after in my knitting.

Maybe I should think of a different skill.

knitcroblo3: day 3 - one great knitter

2010-04-28T06:00:00.001-04:00

I won't try to say a whole lot about this knitter, but I will urge you quite strongly to go read her blog, which is entitled Knitting Letters: A to Z. This knitter's name is Susette Newberry and she is very impressive.

Not only is she in the process of knitting an abecedarium, she researches in depth a different topic for each piece of knitting that she does. It's an education just to read her posts but she makes it an even richer experience with a wealth of links and photographs.

She is also on Ravelry as unionpurl where you can take a look at some of her other projects and download several of her patterns.

If you are at all interested in stranded color knitting, world history, assorted arcana or any combination of the three, go check her out. Trust me, you'll learn something you didn't know before.

edited to add: I've just gotten around to reading the Spring 2010 issue of Twist Collective and guess who's featured in an article?

knitcroblo2: day 2 - an inspirational pattern

2010-04-27T06:30:00.001-04:00

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've acquired a few more books since buying 'The Principles of Knitting' and 'Knitting Without Tears'.

My book count in my Ravelry library is over 200 and there are more on my shelves that just haven't made it into Ravelry's database yet. The number of books I own that have to do with stranded color knitting alone is pretty staggering. I just went over to the shelf to count them and I had to step away once I realized the number was going to pass 60.

There's a reason for this, although it really does seem difficult to justify owning so many books on one subject. I am very taken with beautiful stranded colorwork, whether it be Fair Isle or Estonian or Turkish or Norwegian. I love them all. And, in my defense, I have built this personal library up over many years.

The most extravagant I've been in the process was the summer I devoted a couple of weeks to tracking down a number of out of print Alice Starmore books. I put a limit on how much I was willing to pay and I stuck to the limit. I didn't pay ridiculous amounts of money for any title and if I lost a bid on a book I got over it pretty quickly.

You might wonder why I put so much effort, not to mention money, into acquiring all these books. You'd probably think that I do quite a lot of stranded color knitting. Well, you'd be wrong as I've actually done relatively little. So far.

And that's where the inspiration part comes in. I want to knit my husband a Fair Isle sweater, not just any Fair Isle sweater, but one that will make him glad in his heart that he married a knitter. You see, he has a perfectly good 'Fair Isle' sweater already. It's one we bought in Macy's years ago. It has a lovely pattern in blues, tans, and cream. It fits him perfectly. And it bothers me to no end that I didn't knit that sweater.

So that machine knit, mass-produced sweater, with its little machine stitched peeries and x's and o's, is my inspiration. It has inspired me to want to knit him a sweater hundreds and hundreds of times better. So when am I planning to begin knitting this sweater that will inspire awe and eternal devotion?

Let's just say I've got a bit more reading to do before I pin down the actual pattern. And then there's the matter of choosing the colors...

knitcroblo1: day 1 'how it all began'

2010-04-26T06:30:00.000-04:00

I learned to knit in 1972 when a high school friend, whose mother was an accomplished knitter, got the idea to teach me. My own mother knew how to crochet and had taught me some basics, but I don't remember her working on more than a handful of things the whole time I was growing up. She didn't know how to knit at all. So I was very excited when Susan offered to teach me. She said we were going to knit scarves!

We went to Woolworth's and each bought 3 colors of Red Heart yarn and aluminum knitting needles so huge they were like turkey basters. I chose black, grey and burgundy yarn; I don't remember what Susan chose. We planned to hold the three strands together and knit multicolor garter stitch scarves with fringe.

We went back to her house and she taught me how to cast on and how to work the knit stitch. We spent the rest of the afternoon and that evening knitting away on our scarves. Susan must have been a very good teacher because I don't remember struggling with it at all, despite the enormous size of those needles! Somewhere along the line, Susan also taught me how to purl and how to to bind off. The scarf I made ended up a good five feet long without the fringe and I used it proudly for the rest of that winter and when I went away to college the next year.

Over the next few years, I made a few more scarves and I took up crochet and made a number of afghans. But it wasn't until my second child was about a year old that I began to learn more knitting skills. I was in Barnes & Noble one day when I saw a table stacked with copies of 'The Principles of Knitting' by June Hemmons Hiatt. The price was $29.95 and I had to juggle grocery money to swing it, but I bought the book.

A short while later, I bought Elizabeth Zimmermann's 'Knitting Without Tears' and with these two books I began to learn more techniques. I knit my first sweater - an oversized pullover designed by Helen Sharp, from the Rowan Knitting Book No. 2. I ordered the Rowan yarn from the Tomato Factory Yarn Company in Lambertville, New Jersey. The company no longer exists, but it was the place that gave Alice Starmore her start in North America. I had to call them with my order because this was long before I had a computer and internet access.

Since then, I've bought lots more books and way lots more yarn. I've gone far beyond garter stitch scarves on 'turkey baster' aluminum needles. And I don't go two days without knitting now, much less several years.

But I wonder if I'd be a knitter today had it not been for Susan who in 1972 said, "Let's go to Woolworth's and get some yarn. I'm gonna teach you how to knit!" Thank you, Susan, wherever you are. I hope that if you don't still knit you do have something in your life that means as much to you as knitting means to me.

to read other posts by knitters and crocheters participating in 'blog week', just do a google search for 'knitcroblo1' for day 1, 'knitcroblo2' for day 2, etc.

knit & crochet blog week

2010-04-24T16:01:00.003-04:00

The last few months have been a challenge and the blog has fallen into a minimal role in my daily life. Between multiple crashes of my computer from viruses and a medical emergency in my family, along with the usual busyness of ordinary life, I haven't been able to keep the blog going in a very interesting way.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a group on Ravelry devoted to maximizing the blogging experience. I jumped right in along with a new computer just in time for the Knit & Crochet Blog Week challenge.

Now I'm focused on getting my skills on the Mac up to speed so I can actually participate and so that I can get photographs going again.

In recent weeks, I've completed or frogged several projects and am working on all new projects. The big blanket is done and my daughter has been snuggling under it at night for days. I started the Nordique Swing, that I had knitted a gauge swatch for many months ago, and Eunny Jang's Bayerische Socks with the 'absolutely-perfect-color-for-me' yarn that Jane gave me way back in the fall.

The Brandywine is no more. I love the pattern, I love the needles I was using and I very much love the yarn - my own handspun Wensleydale. But this was a case of yarn and pattern not being the match I thought they'd be. So the yarn has been rewound and will be used in a weaving project and I'm hunting through my stash for a different yarn for this shawl. I'd love to use this as an excuse to buy the madelinetosh yarn that I've been wanting for a while, but after getting the new computer, I think knitting from the stash is still on for a while.

Pictures to come when I've got iPhoto and my camera communicating.

spring crept up on me this year

2010-04-06T14:26:00.002-04:00

The past weeks have flown right past me bringing springtime while I wasn't looking. I've been dealing with an illness in my family, mostly from long distance, but I spent this past week down south helping out. I've been doing a bit of knitting, a lot of spinning and way more talking on the phone than I usually do. I'm back home now and settling in, preparing to go back to work in the morning. I'll be back at the blog soon.

While I was away, the fruit bowl emptied out and Buster moved right in.

what's with the polls?

2010-03-13T07:40:00.003-05:00

I put up a couple of polls this past week because of something I've noticed while listening to podcasts this past year.

I grew up hearing the word 'skein' pronounced with the long 'a' sound, as in other 'ei' words like vein, rein, and feign. As I listened to literally hundreds of podcasts, I would occasionally hear it pronounced with the long 'e' sound. Sometimes, the podcaster would even remark on his or her pronunciation.

I looked the word up in a number of different dictionaries, both hard copy and online. I never found an alternate pronunciation. It was always shown as being pronounced with the long 'a' sound. Still, I kind of feel like it's how I am with the word 'pecan', a word I heard a lot growing up since I was raised in a part of the country that is full of pecan trees.

I pronounce the word 'puh-KAHN', which sometimes causes people to raise their eyebrows and smirk a little as if I were putting on airs or something. But that's how my mother and father said it, and so that's what I say. My own two children, born and raised in NYC far away from any pecan trees, both say it that way, too.

In the end, it doesn't really matter since we all know what we're talking about, right? Still, I was curious and the very unscientific results of my small poll are that, out of 13 people who voted only 1 pronounces 'skein' with the long 'e' sound as if it were spelled 'skeen'.

The other poll didn't have as many respondents. Only 9 people voted on that one. I had asked what the past tense of 'cast off' is. I realized later that I should have asked what the past tense of 'cast on' is instead. I don't even use the term cast off. I call it a bind off. By the time I realized that I had been thinking as a sailor - and I don't even sail - and not as a knitter, though, someone had already voted and it was too late to change the poll question.

Again, the question was prompted by hearing some podcasters say they had 'casted on' for a new project. I've always used 'cast on' for both the present tense and the past tense, and apparently that's how the 9 respondents to the poll question use it, too. Nobody voted that they say 'casted off'. In fact, even as I type 'casted off', there is a squiggly red line under the word 'casted'.

I don't have a verb dictionary for English, but according to verb2verbe, the past tense of the verb 'cast' is 'cast'.

Now why should I care? I probably shouldn't but I can't help myself. I've spent the better part of the last 35 years either working with other people's children or raising two of my own. I do care how they speak. I work in bilingual education helping children navigate their way through two different languages. Repeated exposure to language is how we learn it, and that also means that repeated exposure to incorrect language use will cause a person to internalize that. One example I hear is the substitution of 'later' for 'earlier'. Students that I work with begin the year doing this, but because I gently but directly tell them that later hasn't happened yet, that they mean earlier, they eventually make the switch. Because the usage has become part of their language, it takes repeated exposure and correction to turn it around. Since none of their previous teachers has used 'later' when they mean 'earlier', it seems to confirm that simply modeling the correct usage hasn't been enough to get the kids to recognize their error and to self-correct.

Modeling works just grand for teaching something new, but it doesn't seem to work quite so well for helping students 'unlearn' things. When I was working on my master's degree, I read a lot of research that confirmed what I'd been suspecting after working with kids for a few years. Children don't like it when they are allowed to continue making mistakes without direct intervention by the adults they trust, namely their teachers. They feel betrayed. One child cited in the research said, "Why didn't they just tell me I was saying it wrong?" In fairness to my students, I always tell them upfront that I will be correcting their language use, whether it be in English or Spanish. I try to create a classroom environment that feels safe so that correction feels like a helping hand and not an embarrassment. It works and the kids themselves even take on the responsibility of gently correcting their classmates. No one gets upset.

As a kid, I can remember my teachers pointing out my mistakes without worrying too much about how I would feel about myself. While I care very deeply about a child's self-esteem, I don't believe that correction has to feel punitive.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with podcasts? As I said, I listen to a lot of podcasts and there are occasions when I want to reach through my iPod and, gently, very gently, tell a podcaster "It's tutorial, not tutoral" as she says it, not once but six or seven times in a matter of minutes. Or when, episode after episode, a podcaster pronounces artisan as artesian. Surely these podcasters aren't listening to hundreds of other people mispronouncing these words, but because they are unaware of their error, they do not hear the difference.

Some podcasters make a big deal out of inviting their listeners to contact them with any corrections, but most of them do not. So even though I may believe that I'd be doing these podcasters a favor, I refrain from sending them a gentle email playing the kindly teacher and telling them that they're mispronouncing a word. After all, they finished fourth grade a long time ago and I'm not their teacher.

And maybe because podcasts are produced by individuals who put up their own money and time to do them I don't feel that I can come along and critique them the way I might pick apart a poorly edited book that I had paid for. So, I listen to the podcasts and try very hard to get past the grammatical and pronunciation errors and rein in my inner teacher so I can enjoy what are otherwise good podcasts.

It's hard, though. Being a teacher is not something you do between certain hours of the day. It's something that's with you all the time. Years ago I compared it to alternate side of the street parking. If you live in a city, like I do, where you have to move your car on certain days of the week for street cleaning maybe you'll understand the analogy.

Finding parking becomes a consuming activity. Thinking about what time it is, what day of the week it is, and whether you need to move your car is constantly with you. Errands are timed so that you can maximize your chances of getting a good parking spot. It is so all-consuming that, even when your car is safely parked in a spot where you don't need to move it for a couple of days, you cannot pass an empty parking space, even if it's miles from where you live, without having a fleeting thought "Oh, look at that great parking spot!"

I now park my car in a garage so I don't have to be moving it around on a daily basis, but teaching is my other 'alternate side of the street parking'. It's always with me. So, mentally at least, I'm gently correcting all those 'casted ons' and 'tutorals' and tamping down the urge to offer a more direct intervention.

Lecture over, class. I'll go back to knitting on that blanket, now.

only 29,376 stitches to go!

2010-03-08T15:33:00.008-05:00

Or somewhere thereabouts. Yes, it's true - the blanket , the longest lingering work in progress in my knitting history is drawing to an end. And while more than 29,000 stitches may seem like a lot of knitting left, it's a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the miles of wool that have already been knitted, little garter stitch by stitch, off and on for the past ten and a half years.

Begun as a high school graduation present for my daughter in 1999, the blanket gradually made its way deeper and deeper into a very dark hiding place only to emerge last September when my shame over not finishing it became too much to ignore.

I couldn't face so many more mitred squares, though, and decided to flank the center section of squares with garter stitch stripes to bring the total dimensions of the blanket to a big 60 inch by 60 inch square. This past weekend, I finished one side of stripes and began the other. At 272 stitches per row and 108 more rows to go, that's 29,376 more stitches, not including the bind off row and the single row of garter edging to neaten up the top and bottom edges. I don't want to discourage myself.

First I was determined to finish this by my daughter's most recent birthday. That passed and the next goal was Christmas! Didn't happen.

My new goal? By the end of March, this blanket is done! No excuses. With the finish line in sight, how can I fail?

A favor now. Take a moment, please to answer the two poll questions at the top of the page to the right. Thanks!

woohoo and yay! more browns and greys!

2010-03-02T16:12:00.005-05:00

When I was at Rhinebeck last October one of the things I wanted to do while I was there was to buy a fleece. Well, I bought two - a brown Romney and a mixed grey Icelandic. Not yet being set up at home to process an entire fleece, much less two, I dropped them off with the folks from Still River Mill, who apparently know what they're doing. I came home to wait while they processed all that fleece into fiber ready to be spun.

I knew that it would be many weeks before my fiber arrived, and I was a little nervous. I had never bought raw fleece before and was afraid that I might have purchased some inferior stuff. I had tried to do as much reading as I could and listen to the advice of other fleece buyers, but experience really is the best teacher. And I had none of that yet.

When the box arrived, though, and I saw the bags full of beautifully processed roving, I could see that my two fleeces had been really good choices.

The Still River people did a fantastic job of cleaning and pin-drafting these two fleeces and I ended up with one and a half pounds of the Icelandic (photo at the left) and just a few ounces shy of four pounds of the Romney (photo above).

That's a lot of spinning.

color in winter

2010-02-17T12:25:00.005-05:00

I've been doing lots of spinning these last several months and one of the latest projects was to spin up 8 ounces of beautifully hand-dyed Wensleydale top from All Spun Up. The vendor named her colorway Blaze, which is probably a welcome bit of color for those who've been blanketed in more snow than they would have cared to see in a single winter.

I spun this on the Louet since the other Wensleydale, from Lisa Souza in her Petroglyph colorway, came off that wheel so nicely.

Although I thought I was spinning the Blaze in the same way that I spun the Petroglyph, which I'm using to knit the Brandywine Shawl by Romi, I must have put in more twist because the Blaze came out much 'livelier' than the Petroglyph. And though they're both the same fiber, they do come from different vendors who may use different dyeing methods. I don't know enough about the chemistry of dyeing to know if that would affect my spinning and the way the fiber behaves.

I think the Blaze is destined for a weaving project. I have a lovely dark grey wool warp yarn that would work well with this colorful yarn. Warping the rigid heddle loom is another project for me to do before this midwinter break is over, if I can put down the needles and step away from the spinning wheels long enough to actually get this done.

Another project for this week is to learn to Navajo ply. I have a bit of leftover singles from another spinning project to practice on before I try to ply a Clun Fore st singles I spun recently. It's an interesting fiber and I'm curious to see what the yarn will be like after it's plied. As a singles, it seems a bit wiry - although that could well be that my spinning wasn't what it should have been with this fiber. I do love the soft grey color of this yarn, though.

I've got a beautifully soft undyed Falkland top on the Matchless right now, but it's not very interesting looking yet, so I'll hold off on showing that until I've got it plied. I think I'll branch out into 3-ply with that fiber since the Matchless came with a great 3-bobbin lazy kate.

So many projects, never enough time.

a tale of two spinning wheels

2010-01-30T15:34:00.013-05:00

My last several posts have had a very monochromatic tone so I thought I'd put up a photo of some recent and more colorful work. I've been participating in the AllSpunUp group spinalongs on Ravelry and the November/December fiber was a hand-dyed Falkland top from this Etsy vendor. Her dyework is gorgeous and the fiber she uses is beautifully prepared.

I got a late start on the spinalong because I wanted to spin this fiber on my new wheel which didn't arrive until December.

I bought my first spinning wheel in 1988 when my daughter was in kindergarten and her brother was a baby in big cloth diapers with wool soakers over them. I'd been wanting to learn to spin for more than 10 years but, except for a dog-eared copy of the Earth Guild catalog and a few books I'd picked up over the years, I had very little information to go on.

I saw an advertisement somewhere for the Louet spinning wheel, and I liked the modern, clean design of the Louet S10. So I sent off to Louet in Canada for information about vendors in the New York City area. They sent me a fat envelope with a catalog and a typewritten list of vendors and I chose the one closest to me which happened to be in Rye, just north of the city. Several phones calls and a short car trip later, I came home from the vendor's house with my two children strapped into their car seats in the backseat of my old car and a shiny new spinning wheel and skeinwinder strapped into the front passenger seat.

My fiber source was a vendor at the Union Square Greenmarket and I managed to pretty much ruin several pounds of lovely Romney lamb top. I also bought very small amounts of baby camel and some silk fibers from them as well, but I was always kind of afraid to try to spin these up.

I had somehow gotten a mail order source for spinning books, and I cannot remember how because this was long before I even had a word processor, much less a computer with internet access. Even with these excellent books, though, my spinning never progressed beyond the most rudimentary skills and my wheel would often go for years without getting more action than an occasional dusting off of the cobwebs.

I'd been knitting in a limited way since I was in high school, but I really started to devote myself to it about 12 years ago. Somehow, even with a whole world of information available to me through the internet, I didn't really feel the urge to take up spinning again. I was just really into my knitting. But that changed in the last couple of years, largely due to Ravelry I think, and I began using all the available resources on the internet to fill in the gaps in my understanding of spinning. My old Louet got dusted off and cleaned up and she and I got to be good friends. I've spun up some pretty nice yarn on that wheel, including a recent Wensleydale singles that I'm quite proud of.

Still, as my spinning skills improved, my desire for a more versatile wheel led me to start looking into buying a second wheel. Let me just say that the journey toward this purchase was a world away from buying my Louet. As I said, I liked the look of the Louet S10 but other than Louet's own advertisements, I had nothing to go on as far as comparing the S10 to other wheels. You could say I bought it blindly.

I spent months deciding on my second wheel with most of my research done online. Using Ravelry and YouTube, I was able to narrow down my options and I finally decided on the Schacht Matchless after sitting down and actually spinning on several wheels that had made it to the 'final round'.

A bonus in my pay provided the cash I needed to make the purchase of the Matchless, unlike when I bought the Louet and had to really count out the pennies from the grocery money since I was not working at the time. This time, I used the internet to help me locate a vendor who offered a competitive price and free shipping. Finding a vendor took less time than it had taken to type up a letter and address an envelope to Louet in 1988. The whole transaction was completed online in a few minutes.

What did take much longer this time was actually getting the wheel. There's a real boom in the spinning world and I'm happy to be part of it, even if it means that manufacturers sometimes have a backlog of orders they must complete before they finally get to me.

I still have that fat envelope of information that Louet sent me 21 years ago and the receipt from the Louet vendor in Rye. I had forgotten how much I actually paid for the wheel and the skeinwinder so I dug out the receipt. I had also forgotten that the vendor's business was called Euroflax which is now quite a large company. When I bought my wheel, we went downstairs to the family room in her home to get the wheel. She did mention to me that she sold linen yarns and flax for spinning, but I was all about the wool even then. I don't know what her connection to Euroflax/Louet is now.

I noticed, in comparing the receipts for two wheels bought so many years apart, that the company I bought my second wheel from has been in business since 1988. I imagine we both have come quite a long way in these 21 years.

At the moment, both wheels are seeing some action. I've got some natural grey Clun Forest
roving on the Matchless and, because she seems to do so well with it, some more Wensleydale on the Louet. The Wensleydale is dyed in a colorway the vendor calls Blaze, so stay tuned for another colorful post very soon.

knit and learn

2010-01-23T22:52:00.005-05:00

Next time, I'll read the comments on Ravelry from other knitters before I knit a pattern rather than after I've already finished. Had I done this, I'd have switched to a larger needle for the cabled section of this cap and the fit would have been a little less snug.

My son says he can wear it and, knit with Berroco Ultra Alpaca, it'll certainly be warm. I just hope it doesn't cut off circulation to his brain.

A sweetheart of a knit

2010-01-03T16:28:00.008-05:00

I received the pattern for the Sweetheart Tunic as a gift from the designer and while I was at Rhinebeck, I came across the Bijou Basin vendors. They're the folks who make the beautiful yak and bamboo yarn that the pattern calls for. How could I resist?

Back in October I knit up a gauge swatch for the tunic and then knit a few rows of the pattern. Then I decided to set it aside and finish some other projects first and only now am I getting back to it. Because it's been at least a couple of months since I last worked on it, I decided to rip back the small amount I had already knitted and just start fresh on New Year's Day.

So far, I've knit the set up section for the back and over half the Sweetheart Lace chart and am loving this project. The pattern is very well written and I haven't yet come across a single error in either the written directions or in the charts.

The yarn is wonderfully soft and the lace is just complicated enough to hold my interest but isn't something I need to work on when no one else is around. The yak and bamboo fiber blend itself is a natural, undyed dark taupey brown. My son, keen observer of all things knitted, noted that I have just begun yet another brown sweater to add to the pantheon of brown sweaters I already own. And so I have.

I have a fondness for taupe in all its permutations. More than ten years ago, I bought a little taupe colored cardigan that I have worn frequently since buying it. A couple of years ago, without blinking, I bought yet another similarly toned and styled sweater. And just this past summer, I knit a laceweight version of the little taupe sweater. My daughter suggested I take a photo of the three just to prove a point. Here they are on the left and then, on the right, the handknit version all by itself. You may notice that even the hangers are taupe~

I mean, really, can you ever have too much of a good thing?

When it comes to little taupe sweaters, I think not.

NaKniSweMo...doh!

2010-01-01T12:00:00.002-05:00

Someone must have put something funny in the Christmas pudding last year because I got this very enthusiastic idea that not only should I join the '52 Books in 52 Weeks' read-along on Ravelry, I should also sign on to knit a sweater every single month as part of NaKniSweMoDo.

Naturally, it didn't take me long after going back to work in January to realize that both ideas were complete folly for me. Yes, I do knit a lot, and I read more than the average American perhaps, but 12 sweaters and 52 books in 2009? Not very likely. I bailed shortly after the New Year.

Looking at my projects page on Ravelry, I can see that I completed 24 different projects in 2009, and there are a few that never made it to the projects page because they were things knit up very quickly for gifts or for charity. Still, only three of those projects are sweaters, and one of them was for a toddler and wouldn't have counted for NaKniSweMoDo anyway.

Not being on a similar kind of page for my reading, I can't tell you how many books I read this past year. I can tell you that it wasn't 52.

This year I'm not making any kind of rash promises or resolutions. I'm going to knit whatever I want to and whenever I feel like it. And I'll be spinning more often, too, now that I am the proud owner of two wheels. But that's a story for another day.

I thought I would tell you what happened to the sweater that started me off on my erstwhile NaKniSweMoDo journey, though. On New Year's Day 2009, still flush with holiday-induced optimism, I cast on for the Rogue, using some wool I'd had in my stash for several years. I knew pretty soon that I couldn't finish it in a month along with the other things I wanted to knit and other things I had to do besides knit. So the urgency to finish it was gone and I kept putting off working on it.

A few weeks ago I took it out of hibernation and started working on it again with complete focus. The singleminded approach had been working for me for months and I was finally completing projects and then picking up the next one and so on. Now Rogue is done and I finished it before the end of 2009. National Knit One Sweater a Year, anyone? NaKniOneSweAYear? Somehow, I don't think it'll catch on the way NaKniSweMoDo has.

What follows are some details from the journey.

Early on I had decided not to knit the kangaroo pouch on the front of the sweater, and once the body and hood were completed, I joined the shoulder seams using a three-needle bind off on the outside of the garment since the wool is heavy and I think it adds stability. I also like the way this kind of bind off looks on the outside. And I decided not to knit the sleeves flat and set them in. I picked up stitches at the armholes and knit the sleeves in the round from the top down, choosing to skip the cabling at the bottom of the sleeves and working, instead, a plained hemmed edge. Anyway, there's all that lovely cabling at the sides of the body already! And it saved me having to figure out how to work the sleeve cable top down - the goal being no stress, right?

I bought the wool from Schoolhouse Press about five or six years ago and two of the skeins of the dark 2-ply Sheepswool are a lighter shade than the others. I believe that, at the time, Eleanor from Schoolhouse mentioned to me the difference, but I was intending to use part of the wool for one project and the two lighter colored skeins were for something else. Of course, I forgot all about that until I chose to use the wool for the Rogue and needed all the yardage.

Realizing as I was nearing the end of the first sleeve that I would run out of the darker shade, I decided to use the lighter grey at the end of the sleeve as a kind of subtle contrast. I don't think it looks too bad. Things like this usually have a way of working themselves out, don't they?

While I was working the hemmed edge, I kept getting frustrated by the sharp point of the sewing needle splitting the yarn of the live stitches that I had to tack down on the underside. Then something occurred to me that probably everyone else in the world does as a matter of course, but I thought it was brilliant. Wanting to pick up just a bit of the stitch from the inside of the body, I used the sharp end of the needle to go through a strand of the wool, but when I went to run the sewing thread through the center of the live stitch from the bottom of the sweater, I turned the needle around and pushed it through blunt end first. I then pulled the sewing through and continued on. This way, I was sure that the whole of the live stitch was secured and that the stitch through the body caught just enough of the yarn on the inside and would not show through on the outside. You may have stopped reading several sentences ago and have been rolling your eyes, but then again, maybe not. Sometimes the easiest solutions are staring us in the face but we first have to go through a good half hour or so of complete frustration.

So now that Rogue is finished and is coming in very handy with the bitter cold we're having here in NYC, my attention can turn to what's next. No rash promises, that's for sure. But I may not have been completely upfront about having no New Year's knitting resolutions. About that mitred squares blanket - it will be completed before the end of 2010 because, even I know that eleven years is a mighty long time to knit a blanket.

the red scarf project

2009-11-27T15:33:00.003-05:00

I happened to come across a thread on Ravelry about this year's Red Scarf Project and decided to set aside my other knitting for a day or two and knit up a scarf to send along.

The deadline to send in donations is just a couple of weeks away, but if you'd like to participate, there are tons of quick-to-knit patterns out there.

If you have some red yarn in your stash and a bit of time during the busy holiday season, then why not cast on for this easy to memorize scarf?

The pattern is quite literally the same row over and over until the scarf reaches the desired length. What could be easier?

thankful for many things

2009-11-26T11:56:00.005-05:00

Among the far more important things that I'm thankful for, I'm very glad to have a bit of Internet connection today. My computer was invaded by a virus that prevents us from connecting to the Internet, or staying connected, more often than not. While we're waiting to get this problem resolved, I've mostly stayed on top of my email and my cyber goings-on with my iPhone, not the greatest for blogging.

Today, though, we seem to have been blessed with several hours of reliable connection and I'm taking full advantage to update the blog quickly. There has been knitting and spinning going on, mostly on the weekends although I do get a bit done in the evenings at the end of the workday.

I finished, and have worn several times, the Featherweight Cardigan from Hannah Fettig. No photos of the finished object since I finished this at the height of our computer woes, and it's in the basket right now waiting to be washed! I knit it up with some taupe-colored Jaggerspun Zephyr laceweight wool/silk that I've had in my stash for several years.

About 12 years ago, I bought a little taupe-colored cardigan and have worn it many times over the years. Two or three years ago, I brought home yet another little taupe-colored cardigan, and now I have a hand-knitted one. One day recently I looked at the laundry drying and noticed that all three were together, having been worn the previous week. I think it must be my uniform.

In October, I spun up 8 ounces of handdyed Merino roving from this Etsy vendor for a spinalong/knitalong on the Ply by Night Ravelry group. I made a pretty 'thick and thin' 2-ply yarn that comes in at roughly a worsted weight. The pattern for the knitalong is La La's Simple Shawl and it calls for a bulky weight yarn. I tend to spin a fingering weight singles and merino is a bit of a challenge for me, anyway, with its shorter staple and soft slipperiness.

As soon as I opened the package that the roving came in, though, and my daughter saw the Midnight colorway with its dark blues and silvery grey-blues, she was all 'oohs' and 'aahs' and I knew whatever I made with it would be for her.

I started knitting the shawl about a week and a half ago and finished it last weekend. It absolutely lives up to its name and was a simple and relaxing knit. The shawl came out on the smallish size, a 56 inches wide by 24 inches long triangle, but will wrap nicely around her neck under a coat or a demin jacket. The colors in the finished yarn did come out looking a lot like stonewashed jeans.

And I finished another pair of very thick and warm socks for my son who suffers from poor circulation in his feet. I was on my way to bed one night when my phone buzzed and there was a text message from him that read, "Can you knit me up a couple pair of soft warm socks?" I don't care how old your children get, that kind of message makes you feel like a mother as nothing else can.

I have made him several pairs of socks that fit that description, but of course they were lying in his sock drawer here at home. He left for school in late August, not really thinking about cold feet. I mailed his old socks off to him the next day and dug out a few balls of the workhorse aran weight grey wool that I seem to have a neverending supply of and cast on for these very basic socks.

My son is now home for Thanksgiving and the socks are sitting on top of my dresser, ready to return to the cold north with him on Sunday afternoon. While they definitely will be warm, I'm not so sure about the soft part. Just look at the 'hairiness' of these things!

The wool is actually a much warmer natural grey than the photo at the right shows. Here's a closer look.

I'm just afraid that he's going to have to wear something else under them next to his skin. Even for a confirmed wooly person like me, they do seem a bit, well, itchy.

On the needles still are the mitred squares blanket and the Rogue, both destined for my daughter once they're finished. I predict they will be on the needles until just before the New Year. Right now, I'm mostly working on a pair of socks for me and spinning up some beautiful Wensleydale top in the Petroglyph colorway from Lisa Souza Dyeworks. I'm still spinning on my very old and faithful Louet S10, but a cash bonus I received recently went to purchase an additional wheel - a Schacht Matchless - and I'm waiting patiently for it to arrive.

Trying to find peace and calm in my home with my family and my fibers these days as the troubles around me in my workplace and the rest of the world grow larger with each passing day. I am grateful, however, that I do have a job and that my family and I can enjoy security and relative prosperity.

I hope you are well and that you, too, are finding your own peaceful place.

October's been a good month!

2009-10-26T17:51:00.006-04:00

First came Rhinebeck and what follows are the obligatory sheep photos and then a few shots of some of my haul.

The featured breed at Rhinebeck this year was the Leicester Longwool and I really like the look of this sheep. I kept going back over and over to visit them in their pens and spent quite a while talking with some of the breeders.

I missed my chance to get a bag of washed Leicester Longwool locks when I saw them early Saturday morning. I figured I'd walk around the festival and then come back later to buy them. Bad idea. By the time I got back they were gone, but I was able to get some pin-drafted roving from a couple of different breeders, and later in the day I bought a couple of bags of Wensleydale and Teeswater washed locks from the Spirit Trail Fiberworks folks.

And, for the first time, I bought fleeces! I got a lovely dark brown Romney and a mixed medium and dark grey Icelandic. I would love to process a fleece myself one of these days, but living in a NYC apartment with one bathroom and a family, this just isn't practical for me right now. So on Sunday, I dropped both bags off at the Still River Mill booth. I should have the fleeces back, all scoured and prepared as roving, by January.

With my mind still on spinning, I went looking for drop spindles. And I found three beautiful ones ~ two from True Creations and one from the Bosworths. And on Sunday, I finally found Sheila and Michael Ernst's booth. I must have walked past it at least four or five times without realizing it. But I made it and they still had a number of lovely glass orifice hooks. I found the perfect one for me, all shimmery amber and beautifully autumn-like.

I had thought that I wouldn't be buying any yarn since I have plenty in my stash, but I did end up getting some Shetland wools, some yak and bamboo yarn from Bijou Basin Ranch to knit the Sweetheart Tunic, and enough of this lovely plant-dyed worsted weight wool from the Hope Spinnery in Maine to fill this wonderful little basket. I got the basket from a couple who learned to weave these kinds of baskets as children and have carried on the tradition here in the United States. I had a little flyer from them but it went astray. I will have to look for them next year and get a bigger basket to keep by my spinning wheel for my fiber.

I took along my copy of the book Knit Green by my friend Joanne. She was at Rhinebeck on Sunday, in the authors' area, signing copies of her books, and I got to spend a little time with her. Not enough, but better than not seeing her at all, now that she lives all the way up in Winnipeg! And I spent some time in the International Tent helping to finish knitting to match donations to the Keep the Fleece project. I got to meet several of my favorite podcasters. And, best of all, I was surrounded for two whole days by hundreds and hundreds of people who, like me, are passionate about fiber! It was wonderful to walk around and be among people getting all excited about the same things that fill me with so much joy.

The last few months had been difficult for me and I didn't write about it here. But work became a place that didn't feel the way it had for the last two years, and I was a bit at a loss to get myself moving in a positive direction again. The last school year ended in uncertainty about what I would be doing this school year. My trip to the Dominican Republic in July helped me to move away from some of the disappointment, but Rhinebeck restored my soul and got my spinning and knitting back in a very good place. When the fiberwork is humming along, all the rest seems to fall into place. While my teaching situation now isn't what I would have hoped for, it's good and I'm good.

And - what can I say - the Yankees clinched a spot in the World Series last night at Yankee Stadium, and I got to be there!

Yes, October has been a very good month.

fall knitting

2009-10-04T09:48:00.009-04:00

I've been thinking I'll cast on for that Muir I've been meaning to knit for the last 2 years...

Shelridge Farms Laceweight in Heath
Photo taken at the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival, October 2007

Maybe I'll see you at Rhinebeck?

it's in the mail

2009-09-21T16:22:00.002-04:00

I took the package to the post office on Saturday morning and it's on its way to Jane right now. Since she said she likes surprises, I am not posting photos of what I sent her. Let's just say, though, that when I read her Ravelry page and she listed her favorites colors with pink in first place, I took my cue from there. :)

With the raffle over and the package mailed, I'm going to be taking a little blog break for a few weeks.

I'm settling back into my teaching job and trying to get more reading done as well as my knitting. Also, over the next few weeks I will be very busy taking care of my dog who has a corneal ulceration in his right eye.

He has to be medicated six times a day and, because of my job, I am not able to be home to do this. I have had to board him at the vet during the work week and will be visiting with him in the evenings. I would love to bring him home at night, but the vet's office opens an hour after I have to be with my students. Even on the weekends I will have to take him to the vet's office for the medications to be applied since he is not a dog that will docilely lie there and let me fiddle with his eye. That's a lot of back and forth.

I am very sad that my little dog isn't home with me. I am gratified that he is in very good and gentle hands at the vet but I can't wait until his little face is the first thing I see when I walk in the door at the end of my workday.

and the winner is...

2009-09-12T15:45:00.002-04:00

I started thinking that it made more sense for me to pick a winner and then to pick a prize suited to that person, rather than have a bunch of things offered that might not be to anybody's taste. I put all the names in a knitted hat and my daughter pulled out the piece of paper that has Jane written on it.

I clicked on Jane's name on her comment and it took me to her blog where I started reading and looking at photographs to get a sense of what Jane might like to receive as a prize. After a couple of minutes, I realized, "Hey, I know Jane!"

As it turns out, Jane and I both belong to the Sit 'n' Knit NYC meet-up group, although we see each other maybe only about two or three times a year, if that. Sit 'n' Knit is huge with over 1,200 members. And I think Jane goes to many more of the weeknight meet-ups than I do.

I've been studying Jane's Ravelry page and will be choosing something from my stash that I think she might like.

Congratulations, Jane! And thank you to all the lovely readers who left comments this week on the 'blogoversary' post. :)

it's a blogoversary already!

2009-09-04T21:26:00.005-04:00

It's been a busy last week or two getting everyone settled and getting myself moved into a new classroom and ready to meet a new group of students next week. I was just about to call it a day when I realized that today is this blog's anniversary. Three years, it is.

To celebrate the blogoversary, I think we should have a little raffle here.

Let's say that if you leave a comment on this post between now and midnight Friday, September 11th, I'll put your name in a for a drawing. Over this weekend, I'll choose from my abundant stash of yarns, fibers for spinning, and my books and I will post photos of the 'prizes'.

Edited to add: the weekend has turned unexpectedly busy and taking photos hasn't happened. Look for photos during the week. :)

Edited yet again to add: okay, this first week back teaching has put me in my place, all right. I've been getting home late and basically crashing. Since commenters have until midnight tonight to post, I'll get the photos on here tomorrow and announce the winner. :)

If your name is drawn, you will have your choice of whichever of the items you would like. I will announce the winner in a new post and the winner will have to email me with mailing information.

According to Sitemeter, I have visitors to this blog from all over the world, and I will mail a package anywhere. Location is not a problem, so bring on the comments. :)

lots of pictures, words and links

2009-08-20T12:45:00.012-04:00

My camera was off traveling again while I stayed at home, so there's a bit of catching up to do.

First of all, the Border Wrap is finished. I had it folded up neatly while I waited for the camera to come home so it shows some signs of the folds in the photo. I didn't think it was necessary to reblock it just for the photo and now it's sitting, again neatly folded, on the back of my chair in the living room. One more item comes off the list of UFOs.

I picked up the Rogue again and, after a lot of deliberation, decided against continuing to knit the sleeves flat from the bottom up, and instead picked up stitches at the armhole, calculated the decreases, and started knitting a sleeve in the round. I'm going to skip the cabling at the cuff but will work the hemmed edge to match the bottom of the sweater. It's tough going with the stitches loaded on the circular needle and this sturdy yarn, so I need frequent breaks to give a rest to my hands.

I like Veronik Avery's Nordique Swing in the Fall 2009 Interweave Knits. I've been looking forward to seeing what Avery's new yarn is like and I did buy her new pattern booklet, St. Denis, but I don't need to buy any new yarn. As it happens, I have a whole bunch of Dale of Norway's Falk and it knits up to the same gauge as the Nordique so I stopped working on the Rogue sleeve and knit up a gauge swatch to see if I like the stitch pattern in this yarn. It's perfect and I'm considering making this a project to start after I finish the Rogue and the mitred squares blanket. I really am trying to finish the two things before I cast on for anything larger than a pair of socks.

I finished seven strips of squares and they measure 24 inches by 60 inches. I'm trying to make the blanket as square as possible but I'm so done with flipping the blanket back and forth to knit the mitred squares. So I picked up stitches along one long side and am knitting back and forth in garter stitch stripes, alternating the Noro Silk Garden and the Katia Austral yarns.

The plan is to have the seven strips of mitred squares form the center of the blanket and be flanked by garter stitch stripes down each side. I've divided the remaining balls of yarn in equal halves and will work each side until I run out, hoping to end up with about 18 inches of garter stripes on each side.

I'm sorry I neglected this project for so long because, while it is a bit monotonous, the colors in the Silk Garden are making it a beautiful project.

As I wrote in the previous post, I'm doing a lot of spinning. I should say that I was doing a lot of spinning. Late Saturday night, with just about two yards left of the 'Maldives' to spin up, the treadle just clunked to the floor. I looked down and saw that the footman and the treadle had come apart. It was pretty late so I decided to leave it until the next morning to figure it out.

It turns out that the little piece of plastic (PVC?) that connects the footman to the treadle had cracked into two pieces. I unscrewed everything and reinserted the piece in the opposite direction. It worked! For about two minutes and then it cracked in two again. It's not surprising that this piece of plastic is so dried out considering the age of my wheel and the fact that I've never replaced one part on it.

I sat down and placed an online order with Hello Yarn for the replacement part and, just for good measure, went ahead and ordered a couple of other parts that are likely to go eventually. I don't want to get caught without my wheel again when I'm right in the middle of a spinning project.

While I was at it, I ordered some undyed tops to spin up. As much as I've enjoyed seeing how the colors have spun up, I feel like experimenting with different wools without having to consider how the hand dyed colorwork will look. I ordered eight ounces each of Shetland, Falkland and some South African Fine wool.

I have the Jackie Bland fleece study fibers and it has small amounts of several dozen different wool varieties. The only problem with the study for me is that each sample requires processing and, with all the members of my family currently living at home and with one bathroom, it's a challenge. This summer has the been the first in a number of years where I don't have days and days of time alone. I knew beforehand that this would be the case this summer but I didn't realize just how much I had grown accustomed to having the weekdays alone at home most of the summer. It must be lovely to have a fiber studio.

What's missing here with all my current knitting and spinning projects is something portable and, no, my crochet project does not count since I'm still in learning mode with crochet and don't really consider it a take-along kind of thing yet. Also missing is something that is not straight knitting, whether it be miles of garter stitch or miles of stockinette in the round. Sooooo, when I had to go to the yarn store the other day to pick up a crochet hook, I also picked up a ball of sock yarn that caught my eye.

I'll be going to the Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck in October and when I saw the colors in this ball of yarn and immediately thought 'Rhinebeck socks!'.

I've never knit a toe-up sock before and think I might take advantage of the last days of vacation to learn the techniques with this yarn. I had passed Wendy Johnson's book by a number of times thinking that I have lots of sock books, but I finally broke down and got a copy this past week.

After this wordy post, I'll be taking a break from posting for the next week or two while I work on the UFOs, spin and read as much as I can and get started on those toe-up socks. I'll also be doing an end-of-summer blitz of cleaning, grocery shopping, getting my son back upstate for another year at college, and gearing up for another year of teaching.

See you soon!

on and off the wheel

2009-08-11T11:12:00.005-04:00

Since my knitting these days involves projects that have been around for a long time I was getting in the mood to be working on something else. Rather than cast on for a new knitting project and take my focus off finishing the last couple of things, I decided to work on spinning up all the fibers that I got when I was a member in 2007 of Adrian Bizilia's Hello Yarn Fiber Club and to do some learning while I'm at it.

I recently got a copy of Amy King's book, Spin Control, and have been reading that along with my other spinning books.

I had already spun up the fibers from May and June 2007 last year and was left with four more. It took a few days, but I spun up the July fiber, a Corriedale top in a very colorful dyejob called 'Lantern Festival'. It's the yarn on the bottom right in the photo. I had already predrafted the whole 5 ounces into a pencil roving so I just had to take it out of the bag and sit down at my wheel. While I wasn't thrilled with the colors, I did really enjoy the feel of spinning the Corriedale.

Once I finished that, I started on the August 2007 fiber - a Wensleydale top in a more muted colorway called 'Mollusc'. The Wensleydale spins very differently than the Corriedale and I was making a conscious effort to spin a thicker yarn. I usually end up spinning a very fine yarn and can seriously overtwist if I'm not careful. I had done less predrafting of this fiber so that I could see how that would affect my spinning. It seemed much easier to get a thicker yarn without a lot of predrafting and, because of the way Adrian dyed the fiber, the single has the appearance of a plied yarn. In the photo, it's on the bottom left.

I had the 4 ounces of Wensleydale spun up in a matter of an hour or so. It really flew.

On my wheel right now is a Merino top in the 'Maldives' colorway. I did some predrafting in a different way than I had been doing. When I got the first installment of the Fiber Club, Adrian included some instructions on predrafting that involves a lot of attenuation of the fibers along the whole length of the top. Doing this means that there's very little drafting involved during the actual spinning process.

So instead of attentuating the fiber lengthwise, I fluffed it open sideways creating a flatter and airier top (top left in the photo). During the spinning I'm using my left hand to basically feed out the fiber from the fiber supply in my right hand. The result is a fine yarn that I feel I have a bit more control over in terms of color changes and combinations. It's a more active kind of spinning, I feel, than when I did so much predrafting.

Once I finish spinning the 'Maldives', I will have only the final installment of the Fiber Club left - a Romney top in Adrian's 'Baked Alaska' colorway. It's on the right at the top of the photo. I haven't done anything with it yet. It's very packed down from being in a bag for almost two years. So far, no matter how I've prepared the Hello Yarn fibers for spinning, I've worked the entire length of the top instead of breaking off shorter sections. Doing this I can keep spinning and stop only to move the spun fiber from one hook to the next on the flyer and don't need to stop to join in a new section.

I might just break up the Romney, though, so I can work on reaching into the basket to retrieve a new section while still spinning. I've enjoyed working with these different prepared tops, but I'm getting more interested in working with fibers that are less 'prepared'. In my stash, I have some other fibers that aren't as refined and will require more spinning skill.

I bought some Gotland fleece this past spring that I need to wash and prepare for spinning. I believe that I will use my flicker carder and work on that technique.

I'll be going to the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck this October. I don't really need any yarn and I had been thinking that I was in the market for a new spinning wheel. But my trusty old Louet is still working fine, so I'm thinking now that I'll probably be looking at other kinds of equipment and at the fleeces. I'm enjoying spinning the hand-dyed tops from Hello Yarn and admire her creativity with the dyepot, but for continuing to work on my skills as a spinner, I think I'll be looking at the raw fleeces this fall.

those little details of actually finishing a project

2009-08-05T10:23:00.006-04:00

My great-niece Paige was born in March - not this past March but March of 2008, so she's now almost a year and a half old. She still hasn't gotten any knitted gifts from her great-auntie and here come the excuses.

Shortly after her birth, I started knitting a jazzy little sweater for her using a superwash wool. My thinking was that the new mom isn't the type to fuss a great deal over a handknit. I ordered the special snap, which had to come all the way from Hong Kong, and completed the knitting in fairly good time.

I just couldn't stand the way the finished garment looked. I could imagine my nephew and his wife sitting there in Georgia and looking at the sweater, wondering if there's something in the New York City water that distorts one's vision. The sweater looked oddly elongated and I just couldn't see my great-niece ever being dressed in it. The garment got ripped out and I took the yarn into my classroom for my students to use in their knitting and weaving.

Months passed and other projects moved to the forefront. Finally, I decided to knit something for her to be worn as a toddler since it was pretty clear that she was moving out of the layette stage alarmingly fast. In April I chose a new pattern and bought some lovely soft yarn in a shade of blue that I knew is a favorite of the mom. She had been very clear during her pregnancy that she was not planning to dress her little girl in pinks and purples. The nursery was being decorated in very specific shades of French blue, sage green and cream. She sent photos of the fabric swatches. I got the hint.

I bought yarn that the company calls 'Heron Blue' but I think it could also pass as a light French blue. Repeated attempts to knit the bodice of the 'Little Sister's Dress' were not satisfactory. The yarn is very soft, a blend of cotton and bamboo and the increases in garter stitch just looked awful to me. Another project frogged.

I turned to Claire Montgomerie's book Easy Baby Knits figuring that enough time had gone by already and I needed to knit up something pretty quickly. And I did just that. The knitting of the Wrap Top was finished in a matter of days. All that remained was to seam up the two sides and to find some suitable ribbon and sew that on.

I had no ribbon in my stash that would do so I was going to need to get downtown to the garment district to buy some. Have I ever mentioned that I don't really like to go shopping downtown that much? Finally, though, I made it to Shindo on West 36th Street. Now Shindo has showrooms in Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai as well, and you would have thought that I had to make it to one of those and not to the one right in my own city just a short subway ride away from my apartment. People who live in places that have no yarn stores or fabric stores, much less whole showrooms devoted to ribbon, will be understandably disgusted with me.

Anyway, two months after casting on, the ribbon was bought and all that remained was the seaming. Have I ever mentioned that I don't really like seaming? Any excuse will do to put off sitting down with needle and thread and sewing up a couple of side seams, but I really couldn't wait any longer. The baby is, after all, closing in on a year and a half and the need for a spring and summer weight top - even in Georgia - isn't perennial.

The sweater had used up all but a couple of yards of the yarn, so I was a little concerned that I wouldn't have enough for the sewing up, but I was fine. I ended up having to split the yarn and use only 3 threads at a time since using the entire strand of yarn added too much bulk to the seams. It was a fiddly job since there are three different edges to the garment and I had to use a different seaming method for each, but it was finished in remarkably little time.

All that remained was to sew on the lovely double face satin ribbon from Shindo. After the seaming, the small detail of attaching the ribbon was actually very relaxing. I turned under the raw edges and tacked the ribbon onto the sides of the sweater with sewing thread I happened to already have in that particular shade of blue.

And it was done. And like many other tasks that grow larger in the dreading of them, the completion of the sweater turned out to be ridiculously simple.

Now, I just need to get to the post office. Have I ever mentioned that I don't really like going to the post office?

the wooly skeleton in my knitting bag

2009-08-03T11:00:00.003-04:00

Always a multiple works in progress kind of knitter, I've been knitting with singleminded focus for the last few months and behaving as a truly monogamous knitter. I'm not taking any high moral stand here and don't really think that this marks a permanent change in my knitterly behavior. It's just something I decided to do and it's been working for me.

I have to say that focusing on one project at a time has been liberating. When I sit down in my chair I reach for the project at hand and that's that. None of that 'hmm, what do I feel like working on right now' kind of thing. And I am getting a lot of knitting done.

The list in the sidebar of 'what I'm knitting' has continued to grow shorter and shorter as I've worked my way through all the projects that have been on the needles over the past year. Particularly attentive readers of this blog, however, may notice a new item on the list.

Let me be completely honest. This item, the mitred squares blanket, is not a new item in my knitting queue. This blanket is, in fact, the oldest work in progress I've ever had in my knitting repertoire. I'm owning up to it and adding it to my list for the first time in almost two years of writing this blog. Up to now, it's been the project I try to forget about.

I started this blanket when my daughter was a junior in high school. I had taken a mitred squares class with a friend and, with her enabling encouragement, bought a bag each of Noro Silk Garden and Katia Austral. The idea was to knit a blanket for my daughter as a high school graduation present. Yeah.

It started well enough. I knitted alternating squares of the Noro and the Katia and there was no sewing up as the stitches for each new square were picked up from a previous one. It was going so well in fact that I used up all ten balls of the Silk Garden and had to order another bag. This blanket was turning into a rather expensive gift, but no matter. It was for my daughter's graduation and she deserved it!

And then it happened. The dreadful boredom of mitred square upon mitred square. I hit a wooly wall. I began making excuses for not working on the blanket. The weather was too hot. The blanket was too heavy. I had other things I must do.

The blanket got tucked away in a bag to keep it from getting dirty while it waited to be worked on again. And that bag got tucked away in yet another bag. This is a very effective tactic for putting a guilt-inducing project out of your mind.

My daughter graduated high school and went off to college. My friend, the original enabler, would ask me pointedly about the blanket each time we spoke. My daughter was rather kinder about it.

The years passed. And I'm not exaggerating here. My daughter's twenty-sixth birthday is two months from today. I have a plan.

The incredibly boring - but probably destined to be much used - Martin Storey Border Wrap is almost 90% completed. The Rogue is only lacking its sleeves. The little baby Wrap Sweater just needs the side seams sewn up. All of these things can be finished before the end of the week.

And then, yes, you guessed it. On to the blanket. No more mitred squares, though. I will pick up stitches along each side of the panels of mitred squares and knit in plain old garter stitch until the blanket reaches a reasonable size. The Silk Garden is so luxurious that there's no way this thing won't look gorgeous.

My daughter will have her blanket in time for her birthday and I'll finally be free to tell my friend the next time she asks about it, "Oh, that thing? Done."

eleven months lace and ten days lace

2009-08-01T17:45:00.004-04:00

Like the Japanese Feather Stole, the Honeybee Stole ended up being a project that lasted eleven months from cast on to bind off. I can't even remember why I put it down in the first place since once I picked it back up again I worked on it exclusively until I finished it.

I really liked this project and find myself missing it.

Blocking was challenging, though, because it's very long. I did get the blocking wires and those were a wonderful help, but I ran out of bed length and still had stole to go. I rigged up a frame with some of the wires and some little clamps and was able to finish the blocking job in a manner. Still, I think a couple of sets of those foam blocking boards would be a good investment. I knit enough lace that I think I can justify the expense. I know that many knitters use the less expensive foam pieces meant for playroom floors. Any comments on this subject would be appreciated.

Ishbel, on the other hand, was knit up pretty quickly - in ten days to be exact. And a more focused knitter would probably knit it up even faster. I paid for my lack of concentration in a number of ripped back rows.

Ishbel is for my daughter, but the Honeybee is for me. I hear that Anne Hanson is working on yet another 'bee inspired' pattern. Must keep an eye on that.

knitting content in color

2009-07-30T10:26:00.001-04:00

There has been knitting going on, both along the river and not. In fact, a lot of knitting happened while I was in the Dominican Republic - the Honeybee Stole was completed and Ishbel begun.

My favorite spot to knit while in Breton was the side porch where the light was perfect for lace knitting and the almost constant breeze kept me from overheating while knitting a full-length stole using wool laceweight.

No good photos yet since I neglected to order the blocking wires before leaving on vacation, but they arrived yesterday and blocking will be happening this afternoon.

Compared to the Honeybee, Ishbel is very easy lace. There's no patterning on the wrong side, other than maintaining the yarnovers at each edge, and the lace pattern itself occurs only at the bottom of the piece. Which makes it hard to explain why I've ripped this one back several times and hardly had any missteps with the far more challenging Honeybee. I'm thinking that the simplicity of the Ishbel lulls me into a false sense of security and I fall into auto-pilot knitting and make silly mistakes. There's nothing automatic about knitting Honeybee which has three separate design sections that are worked on both sides.

Inspired by the delicate crochet work done by my husband's aunt, I bought some beautiful mercerized cotton yarn thinking of yet more lace. The photo at the top of this post shows the four colors I chose. Not surprisingly, the colors reflect my recent stay in the Dominican Republic.

Speaking of crochet, I've gotten started on the Anne scarf again - an earlier attempt some time ago has long since been ripped out - but there's nothing delicate about it. The yarn is Blue Sky Alpacas Dyed Cotton and I'm using a size H crochet hook. It's pretty, but my crochet skills still fall into the 'made by loving hands at home' category.

I happened to have a full skein of the yarn, in the same color that's used in the pattern, left over from a baby sweater I had knitted for a great-niece. My daughter likes the pattern quite a lot, so this one's for her.

in Santo Domingo

2009-07-28T13:23:00.021-04:00

Most of these photos are of spots in the Zona Colonial, my favorite part of the city.

My in-laws have a modern apartment in another section of the city now (the second photo shows my father-in-law peering out waiting for us to arrive), but my husband and his sister lived with their grandmother for a time in the Zona Colonial. The next-to-last photo shows the tiny apartment building where they lived just steps away from historic buildings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As we walked along El Conde, the principal commercial street in the area, my sister-in-law pointed out the few remaining stores from the time when she and my husband lived in the neighborhood. It's good to see that 'Los Muchachos' is still selling shoes.

in 'El Breton'

2009-07-26T09:30:00.016-04:00

It really is that beautiful.

There is definitely poverty in the Dominican Republic, the problems with electricity are legendary and government corruption is rampant, but there is also great beauty and enjoyment of life. Dominicans are a very special people.

home

2009-07-24T13:09:00.003-04:00

You know how our sense of smell is so closely connected to our memories? Well, there's one particular smell that conjures up my memories of being in the Dominican Republic every time I come across it.

The ubiquitous 'Bolazul', the solid little cake of dishwashing soap that is found in thousands and thousands of Dominican kitchens, may not be everyone's idea of a souvenir, but it's one I always bring back.

Each time I walk into my kitchen here in NYC it'll be sitting there, humble and ready to serve, and reminding me of some very happy times in the kitchen of my sister-in-law's home in El Breton.

Because my husband is from the Dominican Republic and I've been traveling there since 1978, in many ways the DR is home to me as much as NYC is. Each time I leave there, it's a bittersweet parting. I'm happy that I'll be seeing my family members who stayed behind and getting back to the life I've made here, but I'm sad that I'm leaving behind my other family members and a place where I am so comfortable and peaceful.

Soon, I'll be posting photos from my trip and writing about the knitting I did while there, but for now I'm still settling back in and making the adjustment. The 'Bolazul' helps.

off to the beach

2009-07-08T15:03:00.003-04:00

I'm going to be spending the next couple of weeks in the Dominican Republic, staying in my sister-in-law's house on the northeast coast. She and her husband have built their dream home on a hill up from a quiet beach there and hope to retire in a few more years and spend their time tending their gardens and enjoying the peace and quiet.

When I met my husband's family almost 30 years ago, my then future sister-in-law impressed me as one of the hardest working women I'd ever met. She and her husband have their own business that they've built up over the last 20 or so years and their house is the result of many seven day work weeks and a lot of sacrifice.

If anyone deserves a dream house, it's my sister-in-law.

The knitting is packed and I'm off. See you in a couple of weeks. :)

happy fourth

2009-07-04T11:19:00.002-04:00

lazy days of summer sometimes mean that an old photo gets called in to make a repeat appearance...

here's to a safe and peaceful Independence Day for all.

year's end

2009-06-24T18:00:00.002-04:00

The school year is coming to an end and my students have completed the knitting for our Keep the Fleece scarf. The scarf is 420 rows long and that means my students raised $420 for Heifer International. I'm very proud of them.

a moment of truth

2009-06-06T13:34:00.002-04:00

One of my fourth graders asked me if I finished the Crossroads Vest. When I said yes, she asked me to bring it in to show the class. I did and was asked to try it on. I put it on and waited for the reaction.

Big silence. I knew what was coming. Julianne said, "Don't you think it's a little bit big on you?"

They all knew how I had adapted the pattern to make it smaller, but apparently the modifications weren't enough and it has so much ease that it fits me like I'm wearing a cardboard box. I purposely knit it at a very tight gauge because I made it for use as a layering garment under my denim jacket. So forget about any draping or clinging. It's like wearing a bullet-proof vest.

I see my summer project very clearly. I'll be ripping out the side seams, cutting away a total of six inches or so of knitted fabric and seaming the whole thing back up. If I don't do this, I know perfectly well I will never, ever put this vest on no matter how cold it is under my jacket.

eleven months lace?

2009-06-06T12:49:00.004-04:00

I finished the Japanese Feather Stole and when I went to my Ravelry projects page to enter the completion date, I saw that it had been exactly eleven months from cast on to bind off. That's a bit long for a project to be on needles, I thought.

But when I took the next project, the Honeybee Stole, out of the basket I realized that I had begun that one last August. I don't want to start a trend of taking just shy of a year to complete my lace projects so I'm getting busy. Honeybee is bigger and more involved than the Japanese Feather, but I'm familiar with the pattern having knit the triangular shawl version over a year ago.

I sat down with it last night and am now almost finished with the first section. I'm enjoying this project more because the yarn's colors are subtler and the yarn itself, being wool, is less slippery than the silk I used for the Japanese Feather.

As summer approaches, with the promise of hours upon hours of time for knitting and reading, the cool, mossy green is a treat for the eyes.

(this post has been edited to add a photo of the completed Japanese Feather Stole; the lace was blocked very severely to open up the yarnovers, emphasizing the 'seaweedy' look of the pattern)

antidote

2009-05-30T17:29:00.003-04:00

Sticking to my monogamous knitting plan, I'm working diligently on the color riot that is the Japanese Feather stole, but I did take a needed break this afternoon to sew buttons on the Crossroads Vest that I finished knitting back in April.

The buttons are plain pewter and they, along with the lovely warm grey of the Finn wool, provided a nice rest for my eyes.

Four more repeats of the 28-row lace pattern to go and the Japanese Feather will be finished and looking for a good home.

remember this?

2009-05-25T10:46:00.003-04:00

Many months ago I bought a very lovely skein of Handmaiden Silk laceweight that reminded me of pansies. I sort of fell out of love with the yarn as I wound it into a center-pull ball and the colors began to emerge as they appear in the knitted up fabric. My favorite color in the skein, a purplish blue, faded away to almost undetectable in the knitting, and my least favorite, the mulberry, moved front and center.

Still, I cast on for the Japanese Feather stole and took this photo after completing one 28-row pattern repeat. I put it aside for months and just recently took it back out again. Six repeats later, it looks very much the same, there's just more of it.

I've written before about my relationship with variegated yarns. Often awestruck by a beautiful combination of colors, I am almost always less enamoured by the appearance of the same colors once knit up.

I recently bought the book Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn not for the sock patterns but for the detailed discussion of the nature of variegated yarns. After reading the author's analysis of these yarns, I will never approach the purchase of a variegated yarn in the same way I have in the past. Her insights have helped me to recognize that the dyer did his or her job and it's up to me as the knitter to pair that work with mine, choosing a design that will enhance the nature of the dye job. I will apply this new knowledge to the variegateds I already own, but I don't see many myself adding many more to my stash.

I'm working on the stole now and am about halfway through the total length. I have been very disciplined lately to finish up the projects on needles and not cast on for anything new until this stole and another lace project that's been hanging around far too long are completed. I usually get this clear-the-knitting-decks urge as New Year's approaches, but summer is always high knitting season for me and I'm looking forward to two months of fresh knitting.

It's probably also a good thing to keep a single-minded focus on this particular project that I'm not loving. It has driven home that I can admire something aesthetically without necessarily wanting to own that thing or live with it. I am recognizing that I am happier working with texture and structure and that strongly variegated handpainted yarns distract me from that pleasure.

As I work on this stole I have a stack of books I've been looking at for inspiration. At the top of the pile are Marianne Isager's Japanese Inspired Knits and Classic Knits. The more I look at Isager's designs, the more I find in them that fascinates me.

defining achievement

2009-05-15T16:35:00.004-04:00

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you're probably aware that I teach elementary school, fourth grade this year, and that I've taught my students to weave and to knit.

When I told my students about the Keep the Fleece Project, they wanted to participate and form our own team. As part of our unit of study for persuasive writing, they drafted a fundraising letter that they then took home and shared with family and friends. In less than 2 weeks, my 17 students have raised over $300.

The Project involves knitting one row for every dollar donated on a scarf that will be joined with scarves from other teams all over the country. The name my students chose for our team, by the way, is Knitters for Good to show, they said, that they're knitting for a good cause and because they intend to be knitters for life. Gotta love 'em.

The knitting has begun and here is our top fundraiser with wool and needles in hand, knitting her bit.

My school's prinicipal is big on recognizing academic achievement, especially those high scores on standardized tests, and I do think that's important. I also think it's important to recognize things that aren't quite so easily measured, such as altruism and empathy. So I created a special certificate to give to each of my students at today's awards assembly along with the 'perfect attendance', 'most improved in English Language Arts', and the other usual awards.

Here it is, the 2009 "Empathy Award" for Outstanding Achievement in Charitable Fundraising ~

how many do-overs are you willing to do?

2009-05-03T09:49:00.004-04:00

After the seventh or eighth do-over of the bodice for the Little sister's dress, it's frogged and the yarn is on its way to becoming the Wrap Top from Claire Montgomerie's Easy Baby Knits.

I don't know if it's the yarn itself or if I was just being overly critical, but the increases in the bodice portion of the dress just looked awful to me. I'm knitting with Classic Elite's Cotton Bam Boo and it's wonderfully soft and drapey, but it isn't wool and any increases just seem to pop right out at you.

I pulled every knitting reference I own off the shelves, looking for any increase method that would be more subtle. By the time I'd ripped out the bodice for what felt like the hundredth time, I was reaching for my baby knitting books instead and looking for a new project.

Found it. I think.

I know what I said, but this is what I'm doing

2009-04-28T17:10:00.003-04:00

I know, I know! I said I was going to stick with finishing all my current projects on needles, but the great-niece isn't getting any younger. It's time I knit something for her before I get kicked out of the great aunties' club.

So I picked up some Classic Elite Cotton Bam Boo and printed out the Little sister's dress pattern. Swatching, swatching, swatching...hoping that the slightly heavier weight yarn than the fingering weight called for in the pattern yields a dress that will fit a somewhat more than one-year old.

It's been kind of hot here in NYC - a real abrupt change - so I'm getting some help with the swatching. And I've been sitting on the sofa, across the room from the little Welsh sheep, so he can't see what I'm doing.

boxing myself in

2009-04-14T12:35:00.004-04:00

With the Nutkins off the needles and in the sock drawer waiting for next fall and the Spring Forwards safely in the hands - and on the feet - of my knitting group friend, I've turned my needles to finishing all the other projects that have lingered here long enough.

The Crossroads Vest is the project I've decided to finish next. All those little boxy shapes make for some mindless and restful knitting. The only thinking I'm having to do for this vest is to rework the pattern for cast on and decrease numbers since the smallest size is still inches too big for me.

Resisting the temptation to begin another pair of socks with some of the absolutely beautiful SockPixie yarn that arrived last week (and more on that later) I'm committing to some serious knitting monogamy here.

Should I stray from that commitment, I have this little sheep keeping his eye on me and reminding me that I really will like that feeling of finishing up all those projects that are listed on the sidebar.

The squat little thing was a gift from my son who was in England and Wales just after New Year's. He found it in a little shop when he and a friend went off on a day trip to see Cardiff Castle. According to my son, I would love Wales because there really are a lot of sheep there.

I just love a sock that knows its way around

2009-04-09T17:17:00.004-04:00

A day or two late but, as promised, the socks I received get their moment. Here are the very lovely socks that were knit for me as part of my knitting group's annual secret sock exchange by a fairly new member to our group. She can be found on Ravelry here.

The pattern she chose is Cookie A's Marlene and the yarn is Dream in Color's Smooshy in 'Good Luck Jade'. My secret knitter really came through with a beauty, and included with the socks was a little note that stated that the socks 'were knit on planes, trains, and buses in NYC, Spain, and Morocco.'

Now, for a variety of reasons I haven't been able to travel anywhere for almost two years. And almost three years ago, plans for a trip to Spain were set aside when an unexpected diagnosis meant surgery for my husband. Thankfully, he made a complete recovery, but we haven't made it to Spain yet. I do still have my guidebooks, though, and thought they'd make a suitable backdrop for my pair of well-traveled Marlenes.

So until I can set my wandering feet on the road this summer, I'll wear my wanderlust socks and read my guidebooks. Thank you, Celia. :)

I sprang forward all right

2009-04-07T18:26:00.005-04:00

Indeed, I changed my clocks when I should have and showed up to work on time the next morning. Spring forward, lose sleep, lose bearings and all that.

Well, it's been several weeks since the time change and I met with my knitting group this past Sunday for our annual sock exchange wherein we knit a pair of socks for a fellow Sit 'n' Knitter and receive, in kind, a pair custom made for us. It's the responsibility of each knitter to provide enough information about favorite colors, favorite patterns, yarn loves, etc. to guarantee the receipt of a well-loved pair of socks.

Judy didn't state any particular preference for a pattern but she has a well-known love for purple, green and any combination of the two.

Today, I'll show you the pair I knit for Judy. Tomorrow I will wax eloquent about the lovely, lovely socks I received.

I knit Judy's socks with Hand Jive Knits' Nature's Palette in Lupine, a subtly variegated purple. The base yarn is 100% wool and a treat to knit with. The pattern is Spring Forward by Linda Welch and can be found here. As it happens, Judy knit the very same pattern for her 'knittee'. What are the chances of that?

The pattern is very enjoyable to knit and I can't say enough about the yarn. All in all, a pure springtime pleasure.

'the intentional spinner'

2009-03-24T16:41:00.004-04:00

I haven't been writing about my knitting much lately or taking pictures of progress on the various projects I'm working on. I'm working steadily, although somewhat slowly, both on my knitting and on my spinning. There aren't any new finished objects to share and I feel a bit like I'm just making it through the days until I have more of a holiday than just one snow day. I need some restful time to regain some of my knitting and reading rhythm.

I have been spending peaceful time reading my books about spinning and, this past weekend, bought a new one - The Intentional Spinner by Judith MacKenzie McCuin who also wrote a book on handspinning for the Teach Yourself Visually series. This last book is one I picked up over a year ago and it has its good points.

The author has a wonderful reputation as a spinning teacher, but the Teach Yourself Visually book doesn't give me an impression that matches the things spinners who've taken classes with McCuin say about her. And I don't really care for the format of the series for a subject like spinning which requires - for me anyway - a little more of a feel of the fibers about it. I'll save the TYV books for when I want to learn how to rebuild my computer or change the oil filter in my car.

After reading The Intentional Spinner, I think this book reflects more of who McCuin is as a spinner and as a teacher. It isn't a coincidence, I don't think, that this book is published by Interweave Press and so has a different feel to it.

I can't do a better job of describing the book than is done here, so if you'd like to know more about The Intentional Spinner, please take a look at that review. I'll just add that, even if I didn't want to spin, I'd love this book for its wealth of information about virtually all the fibers that are available to fiber artists today.

And while we're talking fibery books here - as I was browsing through the books in the store looking for The Intentional Spinner, which was not with the only other two spinning titles but rather in the quilting section (I've learned to look past the labels on the bookshelves), a young woman picked up another book I've added to my collection lately, Fiber Gathering by Joanne Seiff.

Joanne and I have been cyberbuddies for a few years now and have met face to face on a couple of occasions, the first time being when she was at the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck interviewing fiberfolk and getting photos for her book. I was tempted to seal the deal with the young woman who seemed to be considering whether or not to buy the book by telling her, "My friend wrote that book!" But since she had given me rather a grim, 'why-are-you-talking-to-me' look when I had commented pleasantly on how jumbled up the craft books were on the shelves, I decided to keep my mouth shut, not wanting to potentially deprive the author of another fan.

In the end, the young woman walked away with the book. I'd like to think that as she's reading about all the fiber festivals around the country, she's smiling. I certainly am.

listen to that roar

2009-03-02T08:59:00.003-05:00

I woke up very early this morning and I could swear that it was because of the collective cry of joy from schoolchildren, and teachers, all across New York City.

For the first time in years, the chancellor has closed the city schools because of snow.

The New York State Math exam begins tomorrow and I'm glad that my fourth graders get a needed reprieve from any last minute pep rally that the principal might have had in mind.

Bring on the wool...

it's about the mittens!

2009-03-01T11:18:00.008-05:00

Yesterday was the swap party for my knitting group where we bestowed mittens we had secretly knitted for another member of the group and received a pair from a different member. My 'knittee' got a pair of Very Cabley Mittens knitted up in bright, warm green, and I hope that she is happy with them and wears them in good health.

I enjoyed knitting these mittens and they fairly flew off the needles. The wool is Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted and I think the cables show up pretty well with this yarn even though it's a single and not plied. I modified the pattern as written only a bit to add an extra repeat of the cable pattern on the cuff for some more length.

And, now, for the mittens I received.

When I filled out the questionnaire that would be forwarded to my secret knitter, I tried to be as specific as possible in naming favorite colors, patterns, yarns, etc. Part of the questionnaire includes information about colors, fibers, styles that you don't like. This is such a great idea since one person's favorite shade of green (in my case mossy, warm greens) is another's least favorite (which in my case is hunter green).

Well, as much as I love certain shades of green, I am also very, very fond of autumnal colors like russet red and I said as much. And my secret knitter was certainly listening for these are the beauties that I received ~

Now, it may seem silly but I got a bit teary-eyed when I opened my package and saw these mittens, partly because the colors of the two wools used were coincidentally mirrored in the clothes I happened to be wearing - russet red and a pale, heathered green - but also largely because of my respect and fondness for the knitter herself.

When I got home I showed them off to my husband and went on and on about how perfect they are. And they are perfectly at home as you can see from the pictures I took to pay them their due tribute.

The bag that the mittens came in deserves a mention as well since it is no ordinary bag but rather a WrapSack, intended to be used again and again and to make its way around the world. How cool is that?

And with March coming in like a lion here in the big city, it looks as if I'll certainly be wearing my mittens this week.

Thank you, my secret knitter.

cables on the brain

2009-02-17T13:14:00.006-05:00

Yes, so I've been knitting away on the Rogue keeping my cable knitting skills from going all rusty on me. After several attempts to perfect the 'cabling without a cable needle' method, I've decided that with this wool, I'm better off with my trusty little wooden needle.

Right on the first page of the pattern the designer makes a point of saying that this design is best knit with a 'resilient' wool. As much love as I have for it, Sheepswool is not exactly resilient. The plain stockinette parts of the sweater and most of the cabling move along smoothly, but certain decreases and cables would be easier to execute with a wool that has a bit more natural elasticity to it.

About six or seven years ago I knit the Cardigan Details sweater using the dyed version of this wool for the main color and some of the cream-colored undyed wool for the colorwork. That sweater was a pure pleasure to knit and has held up really well.

So, I fully expect that I'll be wearing that sweater and the Rogue when my as-yet-unborn grandchildren are in college. Something like the older gentleman I saw the other day on the train who was busily working on a crossword puzzle and didn't notice that I kept staring at his sweater - a beautiful Aran knit with the loveliest warm shade of natural grey wool. It was all I could do to resist reaching across the aisle to stroke it. After about three stops, I worked up the nerve to lean across and ask him about it.

He was very sweet and said that, no, as far as he knew it was not handknit, but that he'd bought it in Ireland many, many years ago. And, yes, it has worn like iron.

I committed the center panel stitch to memory and when I got home that evening, I looked through my stitch pattern books and found it in the Harmony Guide to Aran and Fair Isle Knitting - #8.24. I didn't have the nerve to ask the man to open up his jacket a bit more so that I could see the patterns that flanked this center panel but I certainly like this one a lot.

I've had cables on my mind ever since that day.

forget the flowers and chocolates

2009-02-14T10:55:00.003-05:00

If you really love me, join me in supporting this movement.

paging Camille...

2009-02-03T17:03:00.004-05:00

Good thing Camille wasn't a knitter trying to keep up with NaKniSweMoDo. All that coughing would probably have prevented her from making much progress on her January sweater, not to mention that it's already February and she should have finished that one and been well underway on her second sweater.

I can't claim as tragic a story as poor Camille's, but my knitting style has definitely been cramped by my coughing.

Okay, Camille, so what say we cut our losses and get out of this NaKniSweMoDo thing while the getting's good?

two sleeves and one hood short of a sweater

2009-01-30T15:53:00.003-05:00

The very fuzzy photo in the previous post might well have been a sign of things to come. I began working on a cold that steadily grew worse and was laid low for days. You know things are pretty bad when you feel too worn out to knit even after a day of lying on the sofa.

So, the Rogue is still short most of the hood and both of its sleeves. No points yet on the NaKniSweMoDo tally, but I'm not too worried. February's sweater is a vest and I've got a week off in the middle of the month, so I'm thinking I'll hit my stride again.

reality check

2009-01-19T12:47:00.002-05:00

January sweater? Great. Progressing just fine, thanks. But about that commitment to read 52 books in 2009? Not so great.

After a week back at work after the holidays, it became abundantly clear that, unless I quit my teaching job, I will never, ever finish reading a book a week.

Often, while I knit I listen to podcasts or I watch tv with my family. I like doing these things and I also love to read. And I'm talking about the 'hold a solid book in my hands and read in complete silence' kind of reading. I don't say I never will but so far I have not become a convert to audiobooks.

Reading, unless I'm on vacation, usually happens in the evening after I've put down the knitting for the day and am curled up in bed.

I think you know where I'm going with this. Let's just say that it's been taking me a bit more than 7 days to finish reading your average adult-strength book.

So I'm bowing out of that challenge and am going back to enjoying my reading on more relaxed terms.

I'm still down with that sweater a month thing, though.