Light and Momentary

It's a sweater pattern

This is a sweater made for my daughter's Poppy doll, whose neck is only 4 inches around. It is based loosely on this cardigan. I used 30g of Aran weight wool, worked on size 10 needles at 4 stitches to the inch. I planned from the beginning to work in the round and steek the front, but you could certainly knit back and forth instead.

Cast on 20 stitches. If you are going to work in the round, distribute them among your needles and join. You'll keep the first two stitches and the last two stitches of the round in plain stockinette for your steek. If you are going to knit flat, then you'll keep the first two stitches and the last two stitches in seed stitch all the way down the sweater. Whichever you're doing, work three rounds or rows in seed stitch and one round/row in stockinette.

Next, you'll begin the raglan increases for the sleeves. Work the first two stitches as established (stockinette if working in the round, seed stitch if working flat), knit one, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit three, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit four, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit three, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit one, work the last two stitches as established. Work the next round/row in plain stockinette.

Continue as you've begun: work to a marked stitch and increase on each side of it, and then work even for the next round/row. Keep going until the sweater is armpit length for your dolly. (For me that was 4 increase rounds.) On the next round/row, work as established up to the first marked stitch (don't increase before it, though), and put that stitch plus all the stitches up to and including the next marked stitch on waste yarn. If you've done four increase rounds, that will be 13 stitches. Cast on three and knit across to the next marker. Again, put the sleeve stitches on the waste yarn. Cast on three and work to the end. From here you'll work in plain stockinette, with seed stitch borders if you're knitting flat, until your sweater is almost as long as you'd like it to be. Work three rounds/rows of seed stitch, keeping your steek stitches in stockinette if you're steeking. Cast off in pattern.

Put one set of sleeve stitches on the needles. Join the yarn, leaving a longish tail so you can use it to close any gaps later, and knit around. Pick up and knit three stitches at the underarm; mark the center stitch. Join to work in the round. On the next round, decrease on each side of the marked stitch. Continue to work in stockinette, decreasing every fourth round until the sleeves are a hair short of the right length. Work three rounds of seed stitch and cast off in pattern. Repeat for second sleeve.

If you were knitting in the round for the sweater body, this is where you whip out the scissors. Laugh maniacally and cut right down the middle. (I did not reinforce because I was using nice sticky wool. Also because I like to live on the edge. Google "Eunny Jang steek" if you want directions on reinforcing.) Pick up three stitches for every four rows and make yourself a buttonband (this one is 3 rows of seed stitch, bound off in pattern); repeat on the other side for a buttonhole band. I actually didn't make buttonholes, because with small buttons and big yarn you can just ease the buttons in.

Give to the little girl whose dolly you have been surreptitiously measuring (as you can see in the picture, I neglected to weave in the ends first), and bask in her smile.

Mission accomplished, sweater detested

Remember that ferociously pink sweater in need of steeking? I cut the steek, which was kind of a rush, and I tacked down the facings, which wasn't too much of a pain, and I wove in the ends, and I said, "Here, sweetie, let me see how this fits."

"No like it! Don't wanna wear the Pink."

Pete was willing to model it briefly. (Do you see the sculpture in the background there? It's not a soul-sucking season-sucking sisyphean slog awaiting me. It's Art! Three-dimensional art. It is called "Seven People Live Here" and I fully expect it to make me a wealthy woman after its installation somewhere other than my couch.)

Morals of the story: (1) Steeking is fun and not scary, or at least not on this scale. (2) Knitting for preschoolers is unpredictable.

Stoked to Steek

If you are not a knitter, the word "steek" may not ring a bell. If you are a knitter, the word "steek" may ring a sort of Pavlovian bell, one that says "flee! take your knitting and flee!"

Steeking is a trick that lets a knitter work in the round, so she can knit a big spiral without any purling, and still accommodate a body that has all these annoying parts like arms and shoulders. Knitting in the round yields a tube of fabric, and most people are only tube-shaped here and there. If you want to knit garments in the round (other than eel cozies), you're going to have to take a pair of scissors to your knitting.

Last month I was in the yarn shop with my daughter when she found some wool so Pink it requires a capital P. "Pink!" she said, handing me a skein. "Yes," I answered absently, "it's very pink." I put it back. She brought me two skeins. "Pink!" she reminded me, in case I had forgotten. I put it back again. She objected. After a few rounds of this I thought to myself, "She has a birthday coming. And an Aran-weight little-girl sweater would knit up pretty quickly." I brought home some of the Pink yarn and stashed it away.

I started a cardigan for her but it wasn't as pleasant as I expected. I do most of my knitting on skinny needles, and my hands were aching on the purl rows. I made what may turn out to be a rash decision: I cast on a few stitches at the end of the round and joined it to the beginning. This meant that I could knit all the rest of the stitches, but it also means I have to cut a steek and tack down a facing. I've never steeked anything before, but I feel cool even using steek as a verb. Steek, steeking, steeked, stoken? What's should the perfect participle of steek be? (Probably the very boring "steeked.")

The sensible thing would be to wait until I get the sleeves finished so I can see if it fits. The downside to steeking is that you can't rip and reknit if your plans gang agley as oft plans gang. But I'm not sure I can wait that long. I'm itching to pick up those scissors.

Off the Needles

I made a Baby Surprise Jacket for my officemate's baby. You might remember how happily I chirped about this project when I first started it. Things went south from there. Whenever I make stripes I worry that I am doing them wrong, and I spent a big chunk of my knitting time on this little jacket convinced that there was too much black in the middle section.

It took me some time to warm to the BSJ. I ended up throwing away my first-ever attempt, in part because I was using cheap dishcloth cotton that developed a nasty snarl, but also because I am more a product knitter than a process knitter and I could not for the life of me see a nascent product in the first few dozen rows of the BSJ. Now I know that for each row in the beginning you knit around one wrist and then up to the shoulder, across the neck and down the other arm, ending with a circuit around the opposite wrist. You're knitting a little bolero, which you'll lengthen later.

I was carefully weighing my yarn as I went along so I didn't run out in the middle of a row, and can you guess what happened? Somehow, mysteriously, I ran out of lavender yarn about 40 stitches from the end of the bind-off. Oh, I was SO mad. I thought about throwing it on the compost heap, and was restrained from doing so solely by the unfortunate fact that I have no compost heap. (Yet. Maybe that's an August project.)

I devised a solution involving a provisionally cast-on I-cord bind-off, and then I-corded all the rest of the way around so I could graft my two batches of I-cord together. It worked, even though I spent a couple of weeks thinking of it as the Blasted Stinking Jacket, and I hope my officemate enjoys it.

On the needles

I've been having this wittering conversation with myself:

Say, we should knit a sweater for that baby!

Yes, we should! But we shouldn't buy any more yarn because the bins are full right now.

Right. There's plenty to choose from in the worsted/DK bin.

...Except it all needs to be hand-washed. It's against the rules to give a hand-wash-only sweater to a non-knitter. Especially if it's for a baby. Her mama would not be happy with you.

Right. Can we knit something out of the DK superwash? Or the sock yarn?

You'd have to stripe the maroon/pink/lime DK yarn together with the earth-toned DK yarn. Which, sorry, no. And we only knit sock-yarn sweaters for babies we actually gave birth to.

Right. Okay. We'll have to think about that. [some time later -- an interval ranging from ten minutes to two days] ...Say, we should knit a sweater for that baby!

Over the weekend I didn't want to work on any of the seven projects I had on the needles (that's kind of an embarrassing admission) and so I went rummaging through the Really Old Leftovers bin. This bin is mostly occupied by the remnants of novelty yarn purchased in 2003-2004, before I fell down the knitting rabbit hole and became a person with strong opinions about double decreases (S2KP FTW, baby -- none of your SK2P for me). In addition to the bits and pieces of eyelash yarn and Plymouth Eros, I found yarn left over from the second baby sweater I ever made.

This yarn, a nice cotton-wool blend that can go in the washing machine, leapt into my hands. It was crying out to be made into a Baby Surprise Jacket. "How could you leave me with those synthetic fibers for so long?" it wanted to know. I gave it a reassuring pat and pulled out my size 6 circular needle. Then I...um...ordered one more skein of yarn because running out would be a Big Drag. (It was on sale. And I will totally have room for the leftovers when I ditch that regrettable eyelash stuff.)

I cast on the requisite 160 stitches and was mitering happily along when I discovered that Elizabeth Foss is (serendipitously) organizing a BSJ knit-along. (Some details here if you are curious.) If you have been thinking idly about knitting a baby sweater, this is a fun one: all garter stitch, two seams, brilliantly constructed and infinitely adaptable. You can leave it plain, add a collar, add a hood. You could even add a cathedral-length train in honor of the royal wedding if you were so inclined, though the baby's mama might wonder what exactly you'd been smoking. It sounds like fun, don't you think?

A Dangerous Combination

In my inbox right now I have an email from the designer whose sweater I just made, saying she'd love to have me test-knit for her again. She has a whole slew of pretty feminine designs and she looks for test-knitters regularly. I have an email from KnitPicks telling me that their luxury yarns are on sale for one week only. All kinds of yummy: alpaca and silk and merino and...

...I should delete both of those emails right this minute, shouldn't I?

The Yurt Effect

There comes a moment in the knitting of a sweater when the knitter realizes she has been misled. She is not making a sweater; she is making a yurt. A double-wide extra-tall yurt. She bought the pattern with the intention of making a sweater. The picture on the front looks like a sweater. But really? Yurt.

Have you missed me? I have been knitting like a crazy woman. Remember when I signed a contract saying that I would knit a sweater by the 24th of March? This was a crazy, crazy, FULL-OF-CRAZY idea. So crazy. What was I thinking?

I was thinking it was a really cute sweater. I forgot about the Yurt Effect.

Remember when I said blithely, "Oh, it's a cropped sweater"? Yeah, but I skipped over the part about the gauge: 6.25 stitches and 8 rows per inch. Crazy. Remember when I chirped that it had flirty little lacy ruffly cap sleeves? I was six different kinds of delusional: I am here today to remind you (though you probably didn't forget in the first place) that lacy means extra knitting time, and ruffly means extra stitches and thus even more knitting time (that's how you get the ruffling, by increasing with abandon), and there are THREE LAYERS to each sleeve. Triple crazy. Or perhaps crazy cubed. It would be faster to knit a full-length plain-vanilla stockinette sleeve, I'm sure of it. If I were making it just for fun I would knit the top layer and call it done, but I can't do that. It's in the contract: I agreed of my own free will to knit the garment as designed.

I've been having some pain in my right arm and I emailed the designer apologetically, offering to pay for the pattern if I couldn't finish on time. She sent me a sympathetic email in reply, saying with many exclamation points that I should not knit if knitting is painful. She said I should finish it when I could. So why am I still knitting obsessively?

[...crickets...]

I have finished the left front and the back (oh my HECK the font-of-super-crazy BACK) and three of the six sleeve pieces. The right front is on the needles, and I am optimistic about getting the body seamed by this weekend. Right now I'm not going to think about the remaining ruffles, or the edging, or the ultra-hyper-oh-so-crazy picot bind-off.

In my more disturbed moments I imagine families of Mongolians bending their minds to influence Western women who like to knit. "Make us a yuuuuuuurt!" they call across the miles. "We need a yuuuuuurt!" My husband may be unhappy because the vacuuming has been sadly neglected, and the designer may be unhappy because she took a chance on a new pattern-tester who then pled gimpiness. By golly, I hope those Mongolians are happy. There can't be too many apple-green polka-dot yurts in the world, but theirs is coming right along.

WIPs Run Amok

I have posted before about how knitting is what I do in response to academic stress. As my career angst mounted last month I kept casting on new projects. Last night I updated my Ravelry notebook and realized I have eleven unfinished projects on the needles. Eleven! That's out of control, since I am mostly a product knitter.

And! Last week? Right before I got that invitation to lunch, when I was feeling overwhelmed by my shortcomings? I, um, joined a Ravelry pattern-testing group and of my own free will SIGNED A CONTRACT agreeing to test-knit a sweater by the 24th of March.

[shakes head vigorously]

It is a darling sweater: cheerful polka-dots and ruffly lacy little cap sleeves. And agreeing to knit it wasn't an act of utter madness, since it's a cropped sweater without real sleeves. Let's call it an act of 75% madness. My husband might call it an act of 127% madness, however, since I bought 300g of yarn with which to make it. (Last month when my sock yarn stash dwindled to 500g and I bought another 200g of sale yarn to augment it, he was not at all persuaded by my explanation that 500g was less than a six-month supply and moreover I could see the bottom of the sock yarn tub.)

So. It is time to STOP THE MADNESS, even the 75% variety. Three of my eleven works in progress are almost finished: a baby hat, a flower for the baby's hypothetical future sister (which wouldn't ordinarily merit its own project, except that I hadn't crocheted anything in forever), and a pair of mittens to match the one project I've managed to finish thus far in 2011. (I think all those links should work whether or not you have a Rav account; let me know if they don't and I'll fix them.) They are all three leaving my house today. This means that even when the sweater yarn arrives in the mail I'll only have a single-digit number of projects on the needles. That's practically in the same area code as sane. Right? Right??

I console myself with the thought that the things I make get plenty of use. Here's a skirt I made in the fall that I wear as often as I think I can get away with it, and this is the purse I carry almost every day. The purse is an adaptation of this design, only my yarn choice made the zigzag effect much more muted. The pattern is still there, but you have to look for it. It makes me think of the hand of God in creation: sometimes you have to look closely to see that it was there all along.

See, it looks like I am doing something mindless, but really I am pondering the mysteries of the universe.

Oh, dear

The boy for whom I made the dragon scarf and the dragon hat requested a pair of dragon mitts for Christmas. I have just produced the most anatomically improbable dragon you ever saw. It has teeny tiny vestigial wings, like a T. rex's useless front limbs transposed to the scapulae. Perhaps it can use them for knitting -- they are sure to be useless for flying -- since I may be deposed as the knitter-in-chief around here.

I was watching the mitt take shape and trying to cheer myself up: Embroidery! We can outline those wings with silver thread and they'll be just the thing! It doesn't matter that his lower jaw looks like he was mutilated by a oral surgeon who'd been hitting the Fentanyl!We'll just embroider some teeth in there. Silver teeth will be awesome!

I couldn't quite push back this discouraging thought: hands come in twos. I have to make another one of these things. He asked about them last night when we were talking about patterns on Ravelry. "When you make my dragon gloves, will they be an original?"

It is probably safe to say that these will be the only vestigial-wing-drooping-jaw-fat-tail dragon mitts on Ravelry. OH I hope he is not disappointed.

Can you tell me what you think about one thing? I am riffing on these flip-top mittens and the instructions say to attach the flip top to the palm side. Wouldn't it make more sense to attach it to the upper side of the mitten? Don't you usually use your fingers and thumb together, so you'd want the mitten top to be out of the way, flipped toward the back of your hand instead of bunching up in the palm while you try to tie your shoes? Or am I overlooking something important, with the result that I am making these mitts both ugly AND impractical? Please advise.

Ouchie ouchie ouch and the speediest of strategizing

Why am I saying ouch? Because I am being stabbed in the behind with figurative knitting needles. I am so behind on Christmas knitting that I should not do anything with my fingers after the kids' bedtime except knit like fury.

I told the boys they could each pick out something and I'd knit it for Christmas, but I hurt my arm somehow and it just hasn't been getting better. Remember when I was doing that 100 push-ups thing over the summer? I think I hurt a tendon or something, and then it flared up when I was doing all that stupid twisted rib. It's been weeks since I could lift my arm above shoulder height comfortably. I stopped knitting for a while to see if that seemed to change things. Maybe, sort of, it might have helped a little bit? But not very much, and now Christmas is coming at me like a freight train.

If I had planned to knit teacher gifts or something, I would be crossing them off off my list faster than you could say "possible repetitive strain injury." But instead I told my CHILDREN that I would YES INDEED make them something especially for Christmas. Good thing Christmas is twelve days long or I'd be in a heap of trouble.

Briefly briefly I am harnessing the magic get-things-done power of the internet to say that I have Plans for work this week. (1) My co-author gave me the green light to submit our manuscript, and I am BY GOLLY pushing the button this week, just as soon as I stop obsessing about its little imperfections. Also on the docket: (2) more stats, (3) more training students in morphology analysis, (4) generating more results for my nifty vocab tool. Not on the list: knitting during work hours. Ahem.

Delayed

It's going to be a Monday Night Strategizing kind of week, because St. Nicholas has some stockings to stuff tonight. I was cranking right along on my list -- all I had to finish up today was Snapfish calendars and package prep. And then...

I made my niece and nephew hats and mittens for Christmas, see. After months of understanding that Mama's knitting is off-limits, my daughter has recently decided that Mama might like some knitting help. She "helped" with my niece's hat by yanking out the needle, causing a bunch of dropped stitches, which subsequently sat on the needle in an irksomely catawampus fashion. No problem, I said to myself; I'm sure that catawamposity will totally block out.

I did not know that I was using superwash wool. (It was a gift.) I also did not know that superwash wool has a tendency to grow when washed. I swished gently in sudsy water and then swished again to rinse. I blotted up all the moisture I could, and unrolled a hat that would fit, like, a Peanuts character. Actually, you know those pictures of the Headless Horseman where he's carrying a giant jack-o-lantern for a head? I have just the pink and yellow striped hat for him.

All along I've been having my 5yo try on the hat and mittens, because he's just about the same size as my niece. This morning it was a cute little close-fitting hat with a rolled brim. Now it's something else entirely. A tea cozy. No, a pasta pot cozy. Heck, with a little tugging it could be a hippopotamus cozy.

If the academic thing doesn't work out, perhaps I will open an Etsy shop. Hippopotamus cozies for all!

Tomorrow when I am feeling a little braver, I am going to put it in the dryer. Wish me luck.

 

Cue the kazoo fanfare

I was going to say "cue the trumpet fanfare" because MY HEAVENS it felt like I spent forever making those socks, but really: they're just socks. A kazoo is more appropriate. I finished weaving in the ends over the weekend and I am free -- whee! free! -- to move on to greener knitting pastures. A sweet little doll for my daughter, a fun hat in a yummy angora blend for my oldest, a skirt for me with some discounted Kureyon that popped up on eBay in just the right colors and just the right quantity after I'd been hoping to find bargain Kureyon for weeks.

My oldest asked for Rick socks. [NB: anyone can view that Rav link, not just Ravelers. But if you're even remotely into fiber arts, you should get a Ravelry account.] These are made from Knitpicks Stroll, which is so soft that I wonder if it will sprout gaping holes by next Tuesday. The first ball barfed all over itself when I pulled it from the center, and between the yarn-barfy nightmare tangle and that tricky decrease on the right leg, I thought I might never finish these socks. But [kazoo tootles again here] I did.

My 8yo kicked off the whole sock fiesta by asking for a pair of Pomatomus socks. I needed to adapt the pattern to fit an 8yo and it took me three tries to get it right. He asked me to use Poems sock yarn, which was beautifully colored and beautifully soft but OH MY HECK I will never buy it again. It breaks if you sneeze on it. It breaks if, like, tectonic plates shift in Taipei. I don't even know if Taipei is near a fault line but I do know this: Poems sock yarn is not for me.

My 10yo wanted Switzerland socks, and I coaxed the 5yo into accepting plain vanilla socks made from some cool sparkly Berrocco yarn. You can be like a knight, I told him, with cloth-of-gold socks. It's a pretty safe bet that no actual knights wore sparkly socks, but his first choice was a pair of Pomatomus socks like Joe's and I was already wondering if anyone ever died of twisted rib.

The toddler, of course, didn't have much to say about sock selection, so I made her some straight-up top-down socks in a great Knitpicks yarn which I cannot link to at the moment. Great colors, and so blessedly non-splitty non-breaky after all the Poems hassles that I could have ordered a dozen hanks.

I am making this sound like it was all hopelessly arduous and I shouldn't do that. I love that they were excited about getting socks I'd made. It was really fun to watch them deciding what they should choose -- they didn't take it lightly. And when I handed them out on Sunday night and listened to the exclamations, it was worth all those miles of twisted rib.

Joe's favorite part is that he can slide all the way across the kitchen when he is wearing his new socks. They're much better than commercial socks, he tells me, because they double as skates. If he enters a sock figure skating competition, I will play the kazoo for his long program.

To the tune of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"

Fifty more rounds of twisted rib,
fifty more rounds, my friends,
Then "tbl"
can go to hell
Fifty more rounds of twisted rib...

Back in the spring I told my kids I'd knit them each a pair of socks -- any pattern, any yarn. Two of them picked patterns by Cookie A., a designer of beautiful socks who is stuck on twisted rib.

Twisted rib, for the non-knitters among you, is what you get when you knit through the back loop, or "tbl." It looks snappy. It takes me forever. FOREVER.

After hassles galore and a summer in which I didn't knit very much, I can finally see some light at the end of the Sock Odyssey tunnel. Assuming I do not give myself a repetitive strain injury (which may be a bold assumption, because my right hand is feeling positively arthritic after a week in get-'er-done mode), I will be finished with twisted rib on Tuesday.

And then? No more twisted rib for, like, a year. When I post the pictures later this week, it will be your cue to say, "Oooh! aaahhh! look at that snappy ribbing!"

Finished!

This is my daughter, whose brothers call her "big standing up girl," in her February Baby Sweater. I followed the pattern as written except for knitting the sleeves in the round. Why purl + seam when both can be avoided?

This is her mother in the completed February Lady Sweater. Hurray! The baby version says to decrease the stitch count by 10% between the end of the lace and the beginning of the garter edge; I did the same thing with the adult sweater.

I have trouble picking the right size for tops. Imagine a person with slender legs and big, say, knees trying to buy pants: the ones that fit the small frame don't accommodate the unexpected bulges. I blocked the sweater aggressively to give it more room laterally, so the buttons would work with my, um, knees. I am hoping to wear this sweater for years and my figure will change as my baby gets older. (Knees-y come, knees-y go.) The next time I block it, I'll aim for more lengthwise stretch and not worry about the buttons.

Here we are together. We may have missed the autumn leaves, but this picture makes me smile anyway.

Sniffle

One of the fruits of spending less time online is that I have more time to do other stuff. This seems silly now that I have typed it out [note to my brother: don't leave me another comment with "duh" in it. It hurts my feelings and I am a fragile flower this week.] but it has been a pleasant surprise.

Since last Saturday I have finished both of the socks pictured in their embryonic state (or maybe the striped one was a fetal sock) in this June post. I decided to cast on something new and fun: Pomatomus, in the pretty green Socks That Rock yarn I bought for Stella's sweater and booties. I had a whole skein of it and I was cruising along. The pattern was easy for me to pick up but very fun to see developing all the same. This sock was a happy thing amid the festival of crud. [<-git yer foreshadowing right here, folks] Tonight I started the heel flap, thinking, "I bet I can get the heel turned before I go to bed and then I'll be halfway."

"...Hm," I thought to myself. "This sock-in-progress feels very heavy. And this ball of yarn does not feel very heavy." My kitchen scale confirmed my fears: I don't have enough yarn to finish the pair. This baffled me momentarily and then I realized: mediumweight yarn won't give me the same yardage I've come to expect from a skein of sock yarn. This would be another "duh" moment except see above re: temporary fragile-flower-ness.

This makes me gnash my teeth a little bit. Can I get some knitterly input? I could (a) order another skein, but they make a big deal about how skeins ordered separately might not match each other and that would make me even grumpier. I could (b) frog the booties and cannibalize the yarn. Would I have to wash it so it could relax? (In case it is unclear, the answer I am looking for is "No, Jamie, you can just pull it right off those booties. No need to wash and rewind it; just go right ahead. You are knitting on the same size needles, so it won't be a problem at all." Unless that answer will cause me greater teeth-gnashing down the line, in which case I might possibly be reconciled to a different answer. Possibly. Did I mention the fragile?)

I also noticed that the leg of this sock has a bunch of lengthwise stretch. I could (c) continue to rib across the sole and take advantage of that lengthwise stretch, knitting a sock that looks like it would only fit a Chinese foot-binding victim but which would actually stretch to fit my very own unbound feet. Would a ribbed sole be uncomfortable? Or would a stockinette sole stretch lengthwise?

Input much appreciated to save me from option (d): flinging myself out the window and running away in search of ice cream.

Dress-up Fun

Baby girl in handknits -- who knew a person could have so much fun putting clothes on? (Baby Yours sweater and Christine's Stay-On Baby Booties, STR mediumweight in Beryl.)

Baby says it is very tiring to be this cute.

Term (sort of)

I am 38 weeks pregnant today, which technically means I could have a baby any minute. My uterus is much more quiet this time around than in my previous pregnancies, which is fine by me. With Pete I had so many interludes of regular contractions with a bit of an edge to them that I finally said to my uterus, "I am NOT listening to you, girlfriend. Talk to me when you've got something worth my time." This attitude resulted in my ignoring the first...um...seven? hours of my actual labor (hard to remember precisely because I was la-la-la-ignoring it so diligently), and in my midwife's arriving when I was almost 9cm dilated because I was only just beginning to think there might be an end to that pregnancy. Oops.

I suspect I've got a mind-body thing going, because I really really really do not want to have the baby before my prelim is over, on Monday at 3. No, I'm going to be picky: I do not want to go into anything resembling labor before my prelim is over and I am safely back in my own town. I was joking with my advisor about naming the baby after whichever town was closest when I delivered precipitously on the shoulder of the interstate, but really I'd rather avoid that whole scene.

Yesterday I shipped off the Christmas gifts. (You are only allowed to hate me if you are more pregnant and have more kids than me.) I'm a little worried that I mixed up the two Florida-bound packages, sending the one for my 2yo niece to my 10yo goddaughter and vice versa, but here's hoping I escaped that particular manifestation of placenta brain. I am going to put some knitting pictures down below the cut since knitting isn't everybody's cup of tea, but there are also a couple of full-term belly shots for anyone who's into those. I won't ask whether that's because they inspire pleasant broody feelings (we don't say "broody" in the US, do we? to talk about women feeling that they might like another baby? it's a useful word but I think it's a UK thing) or can't-look-away alarm. Please ignore the toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror.

A Knitting Post

This is the post where I tell you about the knitting I've been doing for the past couple of months, an undertaking that may be unappealing to those of you who do not knit. But here goes anyway.

Incoherent frustrated grunting

Uuggghhh errrggghh unnnngghhh.