Light and Momentary

Pride Goeth Into The Frog Pond

I was feeling rushed and self-congratulatory, and this is a bad combination. I was going to make my nephew a little birthday sweater, using a pattern I'd made five times before. I was cranking through it-- feeling invincible, feeling clever. I'd learned so much since I bought the pattern in 2004, when it seemed so much like a foreign language that I put it in storage for a few years. I'd learned so much since I first used it to make a baby sweater in 2007, when it seemed like alchemy to turn yarn into a garment. Why, look at that nifty little mirrored cable pattern I was improvising! Look at how fearlessly I was winging my stitch counts, since my gauge didn't line up quite right with the designer's!

[This is the part where the foreboding music would stop if this were a horror movie, leaving you with the silence in which you knew the bad guy would leap out of the closet.]

The bad guy in this particular closet? I realized last night that one sleeve is an inch longer than the other. I was in a hurry on Sunday morning, and in my haste to count the number of increase rounds on the first sleeve I completely misread my knitting. I started increasing too early and I stopped too soon.

Solutions I have considered and discarded:

• Ignore it. Let my SIL wonder if she is imagining that the sweater is slightly asymmetrical.
• Hurl sweater-in-progress onto compost heap with the vengeful vehemence born of vexation.
• Add another inch of ribbing to the bottom of the second sleeve.
• Cut an inch out of the first sleeve and sew it back together.
• Suggest a minor surgical adjustment to my nephew's left arm. (Maybe don't mention to my SIL that I thought her son ought to have his arm shortened so my sweater would fit better.)

Solution I will probably adopt:

• Take two circs and thread through the stitches in the section of the sleeve above the last increase, leaving one round between the two needles. Snip a stitch, unravel the round in between, knit an inch, and kitchener the two sets of live stitches all the way around.

Solution that might be faster:

• Frog back to the round where I joined the sleeve, and knit another inch before re-attaching it. This might be smarter, actually, because last night as I was trying to assess my options I tugged on one end of my circular needle and the cable pulled out of the join. ALAS. But I do not love re-knitting something I've already slogged through, particularly when there's nothing wrong with that particular whack of knitting.

What would you do, O gentle readers? I am 16 rounds into the yoke, if that helps you in your hypothetical decision-making. Do you have a solution I have not considered?

Verb. sap. (although this is most a verbum to Future Jamie, who may or may not qualify as sapiens): The fact that you can finish a pattern that bills itself as "EXTREME KNITTING" does not exempt you from making mistakes while COUNTING TO 9. Measure twice, knit once.

Bloggy Bullets

Thank you to the kind reader who nominated me in the Best Underappreciated Blog category of Bonnie's blog awards. Voting is here if you'd like to take a look.

I kept forgetting to mention that I wrote another guest post for Melanie's Creed series. I wrote it in the run-up to Christmas and she posted it in the lull after New Year's, and it slipped my mind to share it here. It doesn't help that Feedly keeps forgetting that I want her blog to be in my list of feeds. I keep adding the feed and it keeps eating it, for some reason.

It is now the 23rd day of January and I have not posted anything about resolutions. I think this is a record. Usually I love to write about resolutions. Perhaps I will get around to it yet. One of the things I wanted to do this year was run 400 miles. That one is off to a good start: as of today I'm a hair under 30 miles.

I have a post in my drafts folder about the WV water contamination. It didn't affect the town where I used to live, which is up the mountain from Charleston and its environs. But it affected friends of mine. Nine counties! With no water! And the company responsible just disclosed that -- oops! -- there was actually another chemical in the water besides the one they told us about. The trouble is that I sit down to look up facts and my hands start to shake in fury.

Lately I haven't been feeling inspired to blog, but sometimes throwing up a quick post will get the wheels turning. We'll see if it works this time.

Excavating

From the outside my knitting supplies probably look pretty organized. I have seven plastic bins, each about the size of a large shoebox. Six of them hold yarn and the seventh holds supplies. They live on the back staircase, where they are out of the way but reasonably convenient. The casual observer wouldn't know about the circular needle Situation, the way they'd leap for you like a clutch of rabid hedgehogs when you opened that bin. Once you'd stanched the bleeding, there was still the issue of the time required to find the right size. Feels like an 8? Nope, 9. Feels like an 8? Nope, 10. Feels like I might be out of time to knit because I've spent so long looking for the right needle? Yep, you guessed it.

"Deal with circular needles" had been on my list for a long time. I downloaded a pattern for a cute little hand-sewn storage system. Every time I opened Preview, I'd have a little surge of guilt about the porcupine nursery upstairs. My sewing these days is limited to capes and Boy Scout patches (and not very many of those), but I kept thinking I'd get around to all that fiddly measuring and marking at some point. Recently Kate Davies posted about using fishing gear storage for circular needles, and when I searched for something comparable I discovered that I could get a Knitpicks thingummy for the same price. So I did.

If you'd asked me beforehand, I would have told you what to expect: one size 0 needle, a bunch of 1s and 2s because I knit a lot of socks, and some 3s and 4s for lace projects and stuffed toys. (Isn't that Lego guy cute?) I would have told you that the 5-9 envelopes would be pretty empty: the 6/7/8 needles are in heavy rotation, and I hardly ever use 5s or 9s. There'd be three 10s, and a 10.5 and a 13 for felting.

I would have been mostly right, but only mostly. Somehow I have this whole collection of needles in sizes 5 and 9. Those envelopes are not empty; they are bristling. Try as I might, though, I can only think of one project I've made with a size 5 needle (the hoodie on the right, whose owner had the audacity to grow right after I finished his sweater so that it is now on the short side) and one that was the product of a size 9 needle (the skirt on the left).

I have been trying to figure out where these needles came from.

Perhaps I am a stop on the knitting needle underground railway. Perhaps there are signs across the Midwest: "Attention, size 5 and 9 needles! Are you weary of your chains of servitude? Jamie Gladly never uses 5s and 9s, and you can rest at her house." I envision a parade of knitting needles seeking freedom, stumping across the frozen ground as they flee from their owners' stashes of sportweight and heavy worsted. They scamper eagerly up my back steps in search of some tranquility. Maybe?

Perhaps I got them from a friend? Perhaps I had an elderly friend who spent her twilight years cranking out baby clothes on size 5s and then switched to using size 9s as her arthritis worsened? Except I don't have any elderly knitter friends in town. 

I try to be sensible in my acquisition of yarn and needles. Our house is small and our family is large, and so it makes sense to be discriminating. I wouldn't go to a yarn shop and say, "Give me all the size 5s! And the 9s too, while you're at it!" So where did they come from? Where where where?

Treasures

Yesterday our favorite babysitter got married. We met her when she was a kindergartner at the neighborhood playground with her family. Our oldest was only four months old, just big enough to sit in a baby swing, and she seemed like such a big girl. I posted about her a few years ago, when she was leaving home for college, and here she is again a few steps ahead of my big kids.

It's the perfect weekend to send a daughter off into her future, to say, "Here is my best gift, O God, and I am entrusting her to you." As I get older the mystery of the Magi stands out more clearly to me. If I'd had a treasure of my own, would I have entrusted it to the Holy Family? The baby might not have seemed very kingly, dressed plainly and in simple surroundings. The Epiphany celebrates a central truth of the Christian faith: the light of God shines forth upon the world. The Magi remind me that it's very easy to look for other lights instead. When I was a kid their travels seemed both magical and logical; now that I'm an adult it's easy to view their journey as more folly than courage. We should follow a...star? To a baby? With a tradesman for a father but somehow the kid is a king? And we should offer him expensive gifts and...adoration?

I'm given to overthinking things, as you might have noticed, and prone to suspicion. But a passage from Isaiah hit me between the eyes this morning-- "break out together in song, O ruins of Jerusalem." Perhaps the broken and abandoned can best see the extent of our redemption.

Tonight we are having an eastern-themed dinner, with tandoori-ish chicken and aloo gobi-ish vegetables, in memory of the men who undertook a crazy trip to bestow surprising gifts. It's been snowing steadily, and now the temperatures are plummeting, but we are cozy in our yellow house. It's been a day for knitting and board games ("tubifex" might be my favorite Scrabble play ever) and multiple readings of Angel in the Waters. On this Epiphany evening I am offering back these my treasures. I am thinking about the way the light is shining from our windows into the night and the blowing snow, and asking for grace-- that our home might be a place where the true Light shines out into the world.