Terrible/Perfect

A bit of lace

Whew. I finally finished up the gift for my big kid and have it blocking. I think another project for the girls is going to have to wait until after Christmas. I'm just not productive at night at all. Knitting and watching some TV is about all I can manage. Maybe some little handwork...not cutting pattern pieces. Ah well. I'm grateful to have kids who will be elated to find handknits under the tree. I hope that lasts forever and ever.

Oh, snap!

That is an absolute first. 2.75mm needles, a bit of tight and tricky business at a mitten tip, and...well. The set came with a spare for just such an occasion, but that's exactly it: there was a spare.

These would be the thing, wouldn't they. Ah, well. Someday.

The real question is: now that I'm down to four 2.75mm dpns when I need five, do I replace them with wood and risk snapping them, too, or replace them with aluminum and risk a dramatically different gauge on the second mitten?

Knitting! Serious business. It's true.

For the paw paws

The bottom half of the mitten on the right looks weird because the yarn came out of a swatch that had been sitting for a long time, so a great length of it was all wobbly. The stitchery on the left happened with fresh yarn, and it looks much better. Nit. Pick.

A pair of little paw paws has been getting awfully cold when we're out these days, so I made them some mittens. These were done up of an evening from a basic bottom-up mitten recipe in Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, which is a great book, incidentally. I checked it out from the library this afternoon for exactly this pattern. It has charts that walk you through the construction of basic versions of all the typical knitted garments (gloves, mittens, hats, sweaters, socks, scarves), but she's done the math for every garment not only in a range of sizes from small child to large adult, but at a range of gauges as well. It is awesome. I intend to do some serious damage to my stash with this book.

These toddler-sized mittens used exactly one ball of Lion Baby Wool (in Alpine Meadow). Shazam. I feel that following all the fussing I did over Amazing I ought to say that Baby Wool works up a really solid garment. It's not soft, but no rougher than, say, Cascade 220, and worked at 6 sts/inch the fabric is dense but flexible. The colors are incredibly sweet, pastel but not in an icky way. All in all, I like the Baby Wool.

I don't like the weather around here right now, though. It's horrible. Just bloody awful. My big kid has gone all loopy because she knows she's standing at the starting gate of the Christmas season, and I am flat out tired. I'd say "depressed", but that word carries special meaning, and as much as I feel like I'm made of lead I know I'm just adjusting to the darkening days, feeling tired and completely not interested in doing the stuff that needs doing around the house. Not that I ever feel like doing it, but right now it seems torturous. Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy, really. So that's good.

These times call for a cup of Mexican hot chocolate, streaming video and some wool and some wood betwixt the fingers, clickety clacking away on a pair of little mittersons.    

Amazing

Here's a new cardi for the big kid. She'd outgrown her only wool one, and I'm convinced-CONVINCED-that there is no better way to stay truly warm in this wet, wet place that we live than wool clothing.

Regrettably, this garment is not entirely wool. It's Lion Amazing (in colorways Arcadia and Mauna Loa, and I cannot tell you why I chose either) which is...hmm. It's 53% wool, 43% acrylic. Mr. Terrible is a horrible, horrible coffee snob (he worked in specialty coffee (read: extremely good coffee) for ages, so I don't blame him) and I'm a horrible, horrible fibre snob. Every time I knit with something from JoAnn I end up feeling that way, very "Hmm." Almost always fibres from my LYS make me feel "Ahh."

Hmm.

Ahh.

Amazing seems to be Lion's attempt at a Noro-style yarn, and to be frank I think it kind of sucks to knit with. Partly, it seems that only Noro can do Noro, but I've knit with Noro before and even Kureyon (so...scratchy...and the twigs...) didn't have a hand as weirdly sticky as this one. At least with these colorways, there were some extremely muddy runs of what seemed like totally unintentional colors. It feels quite soft, though, knit up. It has quite a bit of halo, too, which I feel neutrally towards.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how I felt about knitting with this yarn, because the kid loves the object itself. I finished it last night and already it's got paint on, and cracker crumbs, and quite a bit of dog hair. It is being WORN, rather fiercely.

Which is why I chose the acrylic blend in the first place. Machine. Washable.

Hmm.

Some notes:

This is a basic bottom-up cardi not from pattern. I measured the kid at various points, made myself a swatch, cast on and prayed. It's super long because I expect that at some point SOMEONECOUGHCOUGHCOUGH will throw it in on a hot cycle and put it through the dryer, and I have no clue what this blend will do under those circumstances. Extra length seemed wise. I like the thick garter cuffs and hems. The sleeves are perfect. The yoke went fine, but is rather tighter at the neck than I had hoped.

Ehm, what else...

Stripes! This is "manually striped", which means exactly what it says. I made the stripes myself, out of self-striping yarn with really long color runs, so it looks kind of fancy. The buttonhole and button bands were knit using intarsia.

This whole post seems kind of grumpy and not very amazing at all.

Hmm.

Homebound

I've been doing a very great deal of knitting lately.

I became incredibly ill with the flu a few weeks back (not hospital ill, but bedridden, I-can-see-how-this-kills-people ill) and it's not an exaggeration to say that the experience altered me. Most of us don't often lie in bed for days with nothing to occupy us but our own minds (I was too ill for reading or even knitting); it was, in its way, a sort of retreat. I had time to consider a number of problems, and allow good sense to settle down into some of them, to loosen them up.

In the weeks since I've felt quite calm.

I think the great lesson of parenthood, or of personhood, actually, is fluidity: how to move along with the current of life and not fight it so much. 

You can't fight kids. You can't make them something they're not, developmentally or personally, you can't make them eat vegetables or go to sleep when you desperately want them to or stop a two year-old from making her endless rounds of destruction. You can't force change in a partner, or, say, an overly intelligent dog. 

There is some crazy Zen magic in acceptance, in rolling with it. I am convinced that it's the fundamental source of internal quiet. Having touched it, the complexes built up around the human effort to explain it and transmit it to other people seems very funny and slightly sad: peace, which I think everyone wants whether they can acknowledge it or not, is stupidly simple, it is right there, all the time...but explaining what that means, and how to get there, and how to stay, is extremely hard. I couldn't possibly do it.

But not fighting is a good start. For me, that more or less means not running away from responsibilities, actually physically staying put where I'm needed and doing what needs to be done. Where I'm needed right now is in my house. "Out" with the kids is easy. Home is hard. But I'm accepting that there's nothing out there that's going to change how I feel and how I structure my time and what I accomplish here. And in a larger sense, something is settling down in my gut that hasn't really ever settled before. That sense of searching for some kind of remedy, a fix, has eased up. It's a tremendous relief. 

But back to the knitting.

Having some handwork to sit down with in between the endless tasks of mothering is a huge help: it feels good, physically, to do it. It is something generative, productive, and calming to do in the lulls of the day. It makes home, and all that being at home entails, much more appealing. And it feels like mine. Just mine. That's important.

Square one of Mitered Crosses Blanket, in the gorgeous Cascade Yarns Eco Duo and, as per revelations and resolutions made in a state of fevered delerium, scrap yarn:

It'll take a while. There's a lot of picking up stitches and changing yarns and whatnot, so the squares are time consuming.

I'm not even going to think about all of the ends that will need winding in once all the squares are done.

Later. That's for later.

Lace Ribbon

Whew!

This is Lace Ribbon in Madelinetosh Tosh Sock (Cove, I think), an ever so awfully overdue gift for me Mam, as Mr. Terrible called his Mam. I don't have much to say about it, other than it didn't take all that long to knit (except: if you make a stupid mistake in a lace pattern, you spend an hour ripping back and filling the air with obscenities) but it took a year and a half for me to get around to blocking it, which, obviously (I mean, obviously if you are a knitter) needed to be done in a very precise, careful way. That's over six feet of lace. Finding a safe, clean spot in my house to lay it out, stuck through with a passel of motherloving PINS (little hands! little hands!) that need to stay in place for 24 hours or more is no small feat. Ultimately it was the hearth, an old blanket and an entire box of safety pins that saved the day, and accepting that the scarf would have a not-at-all-planned scalloped effect along the long edges. Unplanned, yet not unpleasing.

I like that the scarf does not go with the shirt I'm wearing in that picture at all. I considered changing, but this scarf is for my mother. I don't own anything that goes with it. So you see, Mom, it may have taken me a year and a half to turn that skein of sock yarn into an absolutely ready-to-mail scarf, but it really was you I had in mind when I made it. 

Square One

 

Hoka hey, it's the very first block of my very first quilt! Actually these are block one and block two. Or more like block one and block five. I have six now. (Six of twenty five. Phew. Eyes on the prize.) Also I made a doll quilt before. I am full of lies, and secrets.

It's the Heather Ross/Patchwork Style joint I mentioned, and I love it. Love love love.

I realized that in order to get projects like this done I have to live in a shithole. I just cannot keep the house tidy and do crafty things and feed the family well and the whole nine yards. Straight up can't do it. And if something has to fall by the wayside, I'd rather apologize to guests for the mess than not do the things I actually want to do.

Women's liberation, yo! I'ma wear an apron and still not clean shit!

(I wonder if Betty Friedan was a neat freak? Something tells me she probably was.)

When I can't be bent over at the kitchen table like Quasimodo trundling away at the machine* I've been knitting and watching True Blood**. I finally embarked on a sweater for myself, which is exciting! And kind of horrifying! I'm not a small woman!

 

Every picture I take of this makes it look hot pink, and I assure you it is not. It's just bright red. And massive. There are 262 stitches per row in this cardigan, with wide panels of 1x1 twisted rib, which means I will finish the sweater just in time for next summer's heat wave, and it will take every ball of yarn in the greater Puget Sound area. Honestly, the thought of needing to buy less yarn and spending less time knitting may be a strong enough inducement in and of itself to lose some weight. I don't give a shit about bathing suits, but I do care a very great deal about good yarn. It's not cheap.

Finally, because I can't just yank one of the many, many skeins of yarn out of my stash and knit something with it, I bought this to make Big Kid a hat:

It actually looks like candy. Love love love.

*Note: this method of quilting is NOT easier than traditional piecing. At all. The quilting is very extensive; I'm using about 100 meters of thread for each square. It just produces a much more free form block, and allows you to do a less elaborate final quilting between the top and the backing than you otherwise might. 

**There is so much sex and violence in this show. I love it, even though I'm not a huge fan of violence, and I really, really hate watching actors pretend to have sex onscreen (I'm not a fan of them actually having sex onscreen either. Barf.) It's not prudishness on my part, but a general difficulty with suspension of disbelief. Any time I see people doing it in movies or on television I can't not think of the silly penis socks and lady patches that actors apparently wear, and how awkward it must be to simulate an act of sex with someone you aren't actually intimate with for multiple shots in front of a camera crew. I love period romances in some small part because they are refreshingly chaste. No penis sock required, Mr. Darcy.

Needle work

I'll have to beg your forgiveness for the doom and gloom bitch and moan of my last post. My emotional life in high school and college was pretty crap, and I'm having a damned difficult time trying to keep my hands on the reins right now, but overall it's...well, I have nothing to complain about. As my mother reminds me, this is all really a tiny moment and some day I will be surrounded by very small dogs because I miss mothering small children.

The real issue of the moment is that the the baby is teething; when this happens everything, and I mean every. thing. is thrown into chaos. It is a little quarterly household Armaggeddon. Baby can't get to sleep, can't stay down, can't rest without help. So I get no sleep, and no time between the kids' bed time and my own. Laundry piles up into a scale model of the major volcanic peaks of the Pacific Rim. The dishes don't get done. We eat rats and collect rain water in pots and pans and sanitize it in a solar oven made of pie pans and a child's magnifying glass.

I could reflect further on this, but I won't. Waa waa, boo hoo. My life sucks.

No it doesn't.

The opposite of suck is this:

Although I think the opposite of "suck" is "blow", so never mind. This does not blow.

It's Heather Ross's Mendocino line, which is out of print. My local fabric store (is there some kind of quilting insiders' jargon for this, like "lys" for "local yarn shop"?) happened to actually have some, so a few weeks ago I snapped up a bunch of fat quarters and the remaining two and a half yards of the mermaids. I'm going to make a throw for our living room out of these (and some others) using the quilting method in Patchwork Style (Amanda Blake Soule has done this a number of times, and uses Mendocino in her latest project).

I also got these:

These are both from Heather Ross's Lightening Bugs and Other Mysteries line, which I can't even find a link for. The fabric shop had a ton of the dogs, which I stupidly only bought half a yard of. A couple days later when I went back to get more (Big Kid wanted something to wear made from it), someone in New York had bought the whole bolt and had it shipped to them. People is crazy. The little bikes I got from Etsy, and I will not tell you how much I paid for a single fat quarter. I is crazy.

But Big Kid has a little yellow bike that she loves, and one of my future dream projects is a twin-size quilt, again in the Patchwork Style, uh, style, that tells something of the story of who she is right now.

 

Did I mention that Big Kid is a capital-G Girl? I really wasn't, so this is super funny to me (and perplexing and sometimes maddening, like when she said she wanted to quit soccer and it turned out that she didn't want to have to put on her boy-ish soccer gear; a pair of pink cleats and a skort later and she was right back out there). She chose the ballerinas and the music notes (she is a cultured little thing), and I chose the bikes and the birds and the flowers (the birds and flowers are from the Windham Fabrics Full Bloom collection). I'm going to order a set of Heather Ross's Far Far Away II, as well, because I have a problem.

Honestly though, she's amazing.

Lastly, there's this:

There are only a handful of yards left of this skein, which means I am nearly done with a knitting project.

GREAT SCOTT!

I will finish it during the next couple episodes of True Blood, because for tonight, at least, the baby is asleep.

New Zealand Autumn Leaves

 

Every now and again I come across a knitting pattern that jumps the queue, and the Autumn Leaves Vest was just such a one, completely wrong season or not. I think this is just the cutest stinking thing. And it's autumn somewhere.

Pattern was simple and easy, although unclear in one important respect that I had to work out for myself (when joining in the purple, you continue in the round to the middle back and then you turn to purl). I don't care for the fact that the daisy rows need to be seamed in back, but I also just don't like seaming. I knit mine up in worsted to make it bigger than 12 months, and it's probably about a 2. It fits loosely but not overly so on my 14 month old, who is tall and thin. She should get at least a year and a half out of this thing if not more. As per the usual, it's really best to use the correct pattern size (and, you know, buy the pattern from the designer, like I didn't) rather than just size up the yarn and needle gauges, but this turned out alright. I would love to knit it in a sport weight alpaca, nom nom nom. This is, rather regrettably, about 90% Paton's Classic Wool and 10% Cascade 220  (the light pink), which are "bleh!" and "meh" respectively. 

Other technical notes: I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off (JSSBO) for the first time which was very easy and is, uh, stretchy, particularly needful in a child's garment. Do you have any idea what their head-size to body-size ratio is? It's like a bowling ball on a toothpick. Go with the JSSBO.

In the bummer department, I recently found out that the owners of my LYS kicked a lesbian couple out for holding hands in their store, which is so beyond crazy in this town (heavy on the Sapphic love as folks around here are known to be) I didn't believe it until I heard it from the horse's mouth. But, it's true, and now I'm stuck shopping at Michael's or JoAnn, neither of which can even remotely meet my needs outside of dishcloth cotton (hence the Paton's of Doom). If you live in the Seattle area, please give your favorite LYS a shout out so I know where to stop on my trips in that direction. Hilltop Yarn in Bellevue is okay, I guess, but not overly friendly and they don't carry Berroco Ultra Alpaca or any Malabrigo.

It's all almost enough to make me want to move to Portland, home of the awesome-looking Twisted (I kept looking at that shop photo for the longest time thinking that was a tiny little bong on the table...which seemed both incredibly shocking and kind of expected and acceptable, seeing as how it's Portland. Obviously it's a ball winder, but...yeah. Perhaps in Amsterdam.) Maybe if my husband loses his government job we'll buy a Eurovan to live in and cruise on down there.

ANYWAY.

I tried getting a shot of Baby wearing the vest, but this is about the best I could do:

 

Everything else turned out more or less like this:

Which is pretty much what my life has been like recently. A big ol' blur, with a squealing baby launching itself at my face.

Hi diddly ho there, Neighbor!

 

The skirt is made out of her Dad's old jeans, too. We're fancy around here.

Neighborly has been on my radar for quite some time, for good reason. It's a very quick knit, but also a nicely tailored, finished-looking garment, two attributes that don't always go hand in hand. It also calls for Kureyon, which I am weak in the knees for, and it's a vest, which the world needs more of.

This season I am forcing myself to work through a big chunk of my yarn stash, and I happened to have a skein of a very manly Kureyon colorway and a skein of my other favorite yarn, Berroco Ultra Alpaca, in the most impeccable shade of red I've ever seen. Neither was what I would have chosen if I'd gone shopping for this project, but I think the result is attractive and interesting, unusual for a little girl's garment but still wearable and pretty.

I was worried about the Kureyon scratching too much at the neck, but she's had it on all morning enthusiastically. My only comment about the pattern is that it is definitely more of a size 3 than a 5/6. I got gauge on US 8s, and even after adding several rows at the bottom it's still a little short for my tallish 4 year-old. But I made it with one skein of each yarn, it fits for now, and there's a little sister nipping at her heels. Literally.

When I gave it to her this morning she said "Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!" and then to my enormous surprise and delight said she was going to name it. "It has a big red button, so I am going to call it 'le Ballon Rouge'."

Bonjour.