Light and Momentary

'Tis the Season

My husband speaks kindly about me almost 100% of the time. Just recently I said, "Would you tell me if I looked fat in this skirt?" and he said, "You look beautiful today." Note the masterful evasion there. Would he tell me? Doubtful. Would I actually want to know? Also doubtful.

So it grabbed my attention last night when I told him about my plan for Stella's Halloween costume. His response to my idea? "That's crazy."

Stella wants to be a cat lady for Halloween. She is going to wear a battered old bathrobe with fuzzy slippers and curlers in her hair, and she is going to have cats in her pockets and cats on her sleeves and possibly a cat on one foot. It is not clear yet exactly how many cats will bedeck her costume, because I am going to knit the cats. The thrift stores didn't have any stuffed cats and eBay prices were higher than I wanted to pay, so...logic, right?

Elwood would not use the word "logic" anywhere in the vicinity of this plan. For a non-knitter he has an unusually keen appreciation of the time required to knit an item, because he has often been the person covering non-knitting holiday preparation duties while I hunch over a piece of deadline knitting with the Scowl of Total Concentration and a Wee Soupçon of Repetitive Strain Injury upon my face. There was, for instance, the Christmas I decided on December 19 to make a stuffed elephant for my nephew. 

I was finishing the elephant's final limb as my nephew pulled into our driveway on Christmas Day; Elwood was peeling five pounds of potatoes.

It seems to be a quirk of mine that I always bite off a little more than I can chew with Halloween costumes, so this is pretty on brand. But as an argument for my sanity, let me point out that the cats are a lot quicker than the elephant. Bulky weight yarn instead of DK; size 10.5 needles instead of size 2; easy-peasy knitting with no tricksy new techniques. They still need eyes and whiskers and front paws, but none of that will take very long.

Also, aren't there, like, weeks left until Halloween? I think, just between you and me and the internet, that I might rip back the lighter gray cat's head to make it match the dark gray one more closely. 

Maybe I won't mention that step of the plan to my husband, though.

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Socks

Long ago, maybe ten years ago, I picked up a skein of Noro sock yarn on clearance and stashed it in the fingering bin. It sat there for ages. In 2017, when we were taking the train to NYC, I cast on a sock and knitted away as the miles rolled by. I worked the cuff and the heel and the gusset before I realized that something was wrong: it was huge. I had thought I was making a sock but somehow I had accidentally crafted a file cabinet cozy.

I realized belatedly (and disgustedly) that I had chosen size 3 needles instead of size 1 or 2, resulting in this bold new line of outerwear for file cabinets. I stashed the unhappy result in the bottom of a tote bag for many months. It felt like such a hassle to frog the sock and soak the yarn and dry it and rewind it, so for a while I just ignored it. But when I finally did start it over, it caught the eye of my second son. "Who's that for?" he wanted to know. "Do you want it?" I asked him. He did.

I worked big swaths of it on our New Year's trip to my parents' house. (The thing about socks for man-sized feet is that they require only slightly less knitting than an actual file cabinet cozy.) When I reached the end of the first sock, I wasn't quite sure how to start the second one. Noro sock yarn is famous for its long stripe repeats, and this skein had been designed so that a woman's sock would consume about one repeat, with some wiggle room for long cuffs or long feet. A man's sock, though, ate up a little more than a single repeat. This meant I would have to wind a lot of yarn to make the socks match.

But when I consulted my son about his preference for the second one, I learned he didn't care whether the socks matched exactly. We agreed on a plan, and I finished up the second sock yesterday. (They are shown on my feet. They are much less baggy on his.) He is very pleased with them. We both love those yummy pink-shading-to-coral stripes across the mid-foot.

I might take a wee break from knitting man-socks now.

Subtly Apocalyptic. Owlishly Apocalyptic.

Our tree-topper is this blingy star I bought on clearance at Target and have hated ever since. It always sits askew on the topmost branch, causing me vague dissatisfaction. I've thought for years about knitting a felted angel to replace it, and this year I finally sprang into action.

I've always hated our tree-topper and I keep thinking I should knit up a little felted angel. Elwood was on board with this plan until I said I'd need to buy a skein of yarn.

"How can you not have enough yarn?" he wanted to know. "There's so much yarn in our house!"

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 17, 2018

For Elwood's sake I decided not to felt the angel, so I could use up a stashed skein of cream-colored superwash. I used Elizabeth Zimmermann's angel pattern from Knitter's Almanac and cast on 56 stitches on the 17th of December.

If you are a Catholic person thinking about angels on the 17th of December, especially a Catholic person who is fond of the O Antiphons, you might find inspiration striking you as you work on a project with seven ribbed panels. 

I decided to knit ERO CRAS into the panels of the new angel tree-topper's robe, and so I am googling knitted alphabets while drinking a pumpkin smoothie.

This is pretty much me acting like a caricature of myself.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 18, 2018

"That is very on-brand," observed my 19yo, when I told him what I was doing.

I am finishing up my annual read-through of the Bible, which is structured so that I'm spending December reading Revelation and the prophets. This reading schedule does not bring warm cozy angels to mind. The angels in these books are not saying "fear not!" because the world is scary and they've come to make things better. They're saying "fear not!" because they ARE the scary. (I mean, yeah, they've come to make things better. But I myself would need a little fear-not-ing if I encountered an angel with eyes like flaming torches.)

I decided that if I was going apocalyptic I might as well go whole hog, and give my angel eyes like flaming torches. My 16yo suggested a little butane. Elwood thought solid fuel would be a better choice. I decided to go for a subtle array of purl stitches to represent flames, which seemed less likely to send our Christmas tree up in smoke. Sadly, my angel's face now looks more like a mutant owl than like a herald of the almighty God. "You gotta go big, Mom," counseled my 16yo. He is optimistic that we could have actual flaming eyes without an actual flaming tree, but he says that if I am unwilling to go the butane route I should at least break out the red and gold yarn.

I hesitate to dip a toe into embroidery territory, given that Christmas Eve is Monday and this angel still needs arms and wings.

"You'll have to give it six wings, of course," said the 19yo. "I don't think I have time for that," I told Elwood, "although if it's covering its face with one set I wouldn't have to worry about how accurately I had rendered the flaming-torch eyes."

"Maybe," said Elwood, "angels grow a new pair of wings every year. One for this year, one for next year, one for the year after that."

"Like antlers!" I said, and we burst out laughing.

So. I do not love this quirky angel, but OH MY GOODNESS do I enjoy my quirky family.

6/7 of my family is home tonight and also my knitting is making me happy

Tonight four of my children will be sleeping under my roof, which makes me feel like all's right in the world. They are sitting at the dining room table with Elwood and playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game in which each player tries to sneak contraband past the crooked sheriff. It stresses me out a little just listening to them play, because it pushes my rule-follower buttons. You mean the RULES say I'm supposed to LIE and SNEAK? That doesn't make ANY SENSE! 

I have been knitting instead. Remember when I told you that the election broke my brain? I tried to start a pretty happy brioche project that night and I just couldn't manage it. Today it was supposed to be a diversion in between stretches of grading, but I wound up not doing a lot of grading. I submitted a manuscript at lunchtime and something in my brain said, "Well, that's probably enough work for one day. It's Thanksgiving break, after all."

So let's talk about brioche stitch instead of grading. Do you know about brioche stitch? It is an unusually pleasant and squooshy way to knit, and it yields a warm pretty fabric. Or at least the fabric is pretty if you do it right. Brioche stitch is much more complex architecturally than plain-vanilla knitting, because you're either wrapping a stitch in a second strand of yarn or working a stitch together with its wrap. Oh, and you have to work each row twice, so that each stitch can get the treatment that it didn't get the first time. In ordinary knitting, dropping a stitch is like dropping a pea into a glass of water at the dinner table. It's mildly annoying, but you can fish it right out. In brioche stitch, dropping a stitch is like-- remember in Fellowship of the Ring when Pippin dropped a stone into a well in the mines of Moria? Kind of like that.

But I found this nifty brioche pattern and I decided to make the two-color version in a pair of luscious Malabrigo yarns. One is a deep velvety saturated purple, and the other is this gently variegated blue-green with pops of lavender and also of gold. It reminds me of the gardens at Giverny. This picture does not do justice to the colors, or to the pattern. 

Oh, HA, I did not know until I went looking for the pattern link that the texture-y bits were inspired by Princess Leia's hairdo. Here I thought they must be something floral.

Another distinctive thing about brioche knitting is that it gives you a reversible fabric. Cool, huh?

This is the third time I've used brioche stitch. I made Stella a hat, and there was a brioche section in the shawl I wound up giving to a friend a couple of years ago. But I've never quite figured out how to sort things out if they go catawampus. Learning to fix knitting mistakes was unexpectedly freeing: you can try anything if you know how to repair your mistakes. Brioche stitch, though-- so far I just stare at the mistakes and think, "Huh, that's not what was supposed to happen." In knitting as in life, the "Maybe I Just Won't Make Any Mistakes" plan is never a sensible tactic. It seems likely that knitting up 200g of fingering weight yarn in brioche stitch is going to offer me some opportunities to figure out what to do when things go catawampus.

We'll see how that works out, I guess.

The Mittens of Uncertainty

Stella and I were walking together earlier this week when she said, "I wish I had a pair of mittens in fall colors." I asked her to tell me more. Flame orange, she thought, perhaps with some golden yellow.

Coincidentally, I had stumbled across a leaf-patterned mitten when I was in my Rav library on Tuesday night. (You guys, the election temporarily broke my brain. Do you remember that stretch on Tuesday evening when Nate Silver started revising his House projections downward? I just-- I couldn't do anything. I cast on a new brioche project that was supposed to be a pleasing distraction and I couldn't manage it. I have never met a knitting pattern that was too hard for me, but I unraveled my cast-on attempt and set it aside, confounded. When I start it over and add it to my notebook I will have to give it a suitable name, like maybe Free & Fair Elections Forever.)

I went stash-diving that very day and asked Stella to pick two of the three yarns I found. She chose a beautiful red-orange paired with a cheerful golden yellow, and I cast on last night while we read A Little Princess together.

I am not entirely sure about this mitten, you guys. While in theory the colors should remind one of a grove of beauteous autumn trees, I fear they are more reminiscent of ketchup and mustard. Some of the acorns are looking like they were attacked by famished squirrels before they made it to the mitten. Here, I'll show you. In person the yellow is much brighter. It's pretty much Lego yellow. It's lovely on a tree. Some find it delightful on a hot dog. The jury is still out on Lego yellow mittens.

There's also a possibility that the finished item will be way too big for Stella. It's an adult-sized pattern. I tried to scale it down by using DK yarn and smaller needles, but she may still end up with a lot of extra room. This is a theme across my knitting posts. There was the hippopotamus cozy hat, and the hippopotamus-friendly socks, and now it seems that Stella will be able to tuck a pet pangolin into her mittens when she heads outside.

I hope her pet pangolin likes mustard.

Embrace the weird

Remember how I was knitting a mystery project? Clues 1 and 2 left me with this big right triangle. Its unexplained appendage is dangling down behind the chair.  

Clue 3 instructs us to break our yarn and unearth another size 6 needle, and construct a long and pointy V. We are talking super long and pointy. Like, wrist-to-shoulder long, ending in an itsy-bitsy acute angle. 

This had better not be the bottom center of the shawl, my friends, because it would be like a large and blinky sign saying BEHOLD MY BUTT. 

My butt needs no beholding. 

My Clue 3 might need some beholding, though:   

It is possible that she is planning for the first piece to be the left "wing" and the second piece to be the closely related but slightly asymmetrical right "wing," and that we'll start knitting the fabric to join them tomorrow.

It is also possible that she has some bananapants next step up her sleeve that hasn't even occurred to me. 

Tune in next week for a further installment of "Jamie Invests Many Hours of Her Life in a Thing That Might Be Really Hideous But She Doesn't Even Know Yet."

Summer knitting (you can just go ahead and delete this one, Veronica)

Recently I was talking to a pal about my blog. "I'll read anything you write," she said, "but not the knitting posts. I just delete those." If you are also an anti-fan of knitting posts, this is your cue to go read about the World Cup or ketogenic waffle recipes or whatever floats your boat.

Ysolda Teague is doing another mystery knit-along, and I bought some yummy fingering-weight Malabrigo yarn for it. After the first week -- and even through most of the second -- I was a little worried that it was going to be a big boring right triangle. But she threw in a funky twist at the end of week 2. Will she have us make a sort of kite shape? Or a festival of mitered decreases? I won't know until Monday. Who knew knitting was such a suspenseful hobby?

Joe wanted me to knit him some socks, but he wasn't quite sure what they should look like. He found some yarn he liked, black with brightly colored neps. "What about socks with cherries on them?" he wanted to know. Cherries, check. I started knitting in some Fair Isle cherries, but he looked at them with a pained expression. He was hoping for more entropic cherries, as it turned out, and Fair Isle cherries were too orderly. Because I love him, I ripped them back and told him I could give him cherry entropy via duplicate stitch. The first sock needs one more cherry plus stems and leaves; the second sock needs a looser bind-off in addition to its cherries. I was going to give these to him for his name day a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I'll manage it by Pete's name day next week. 

I was also going to give a knitted half-birthday gift to my oldest, but maybe he will get a gift for Pete's name day too. He wanted a slouchy beanie, with a star on its crown. 

Back in February I cast on a sweater with the Mason-Dixon ladies, who invited their readers to bang out a Carbeth. I zipped along up to the sleeves, but I lost momentum with a few inches to go on the first sleeve. I came back to it in May, but when I cast on the second sleeve I forgot which size I had been knitting and accidentally made it smaller than the first one. Whoops! I hadn't taken notes because this was going to be a quick knit, so it required some head-scratching to figure out what was going on. It's a whisker away from finished. I have to weave in a bunch of ends, and close up the underarm gaps you always get with a raglan, and then I will have myself a lovely bulky-weight funnel-neck sweater. It will be just the thing for the Midwest in July.

No hypothermia here

Were you feeling worried about me today, my friends? Did you perhaps wake up thinking, "I hope Jamie is warm enough today. The high in Gladlyville will only be 92 and I hope she will have enough layers to survive." No? Neither did I actually, but if you feared I might succumb to hypothermia today I have good news in the form of an alpaca sweater.

All the cool knitters are wearing alpaca sweaters on 92-degree days. Alpaca sweaters are sweeping the nation this summer. But this is a special alpaca sweater, because it has turtles. And? To make it extra-practical? Bell sleeves.

Do you have a turtle-covered bell-sleeved alpaca sweater, one so long and drapey that you might think about calling it a coat-dress? I thought not.

I finished it this morning and blocked it right away. The kids have been cheering me on as I inched through those turtle lapels, with Elwood watching bemusedly and wondering to himself why anyone might choose to spend two years of her life knitting a tortuginous alpaca coat-dress. (Hush up, spellcheck. Find me a better word that means "full of turtles," I dare you.)

After I grafted the bottom neck stitches to the top lapel stitches I slipped it on and swanned into the kitchen. "Hey!" said my 18yo. "That looks really nice!"

"Thanks," I said. Then I rolled my eyes: "Just the thing for a 92-degree day-- an alpaca sweater!"

"Well," he said seriously, "at least it's laceweight alpaca."

I worry sometimes that I am sending my teens out into the world with gaps in their repositories of Life Skills. But at least I can be sure that if their future ever hinges on accurate identification of yarn weights, they're all set.

I wove in the ends.

I sewed on a button, but it might be a temporary button. We'll see.

Temporary button or no, I'm calling it done. It is the hardest knitting project I have ever tackled. Here is where I might normally say "I can't wait to wear it!" but it is 84 degrees in my living room right now. I can wait, actually.

The Whackadoodliest

In the years that I have been blogging about knitting, I have shared some whackadoodle projects. There were the octopus pajamas. 

There was the Cthulhu balaclava.

There was the monkey-face sweater.

But this sweater that I am trying to finish-- it takes the cake. How does it confound me? Let me count the ways. First, it's a hip-length laceweight sweater. It was always going to be a boatload of knitting. It's not just a boatload of knitting, though: it's a boatload of lace knitting, with a type of construction I'd never encountered before -- one in which you build from a suspender to make a sleeve. Oh, and can we talk about the grafting in pattern? Because there's lots of grafting in pattern. I spent months avoiding the first whack of it, before I knuckled down and braved it out.

Even so, I was making progress. I'd get to a spot where I'd think, "I...don't think I have the brainpower for that part right now," and I'd stash it in a bag for a while. Eventually I'd get it figured out and inch along to the next sticky bit.

First sleeve, check, despite the tricky cuff. Second sleeve, check; ditto. Back, completed, even though I thought I'd be grafting in pattern until Jesus came back. Waist, surprisingly easy. Skirt, modified slightly from the pattern but not hard. Just sloooooooooooooow. The whole thing is slow. Next month will be two years since I cast this sucker on.

On paper, it looks like I don't have much left to do-- just the lapels and some sort of closure. The lapels are the most distinctive thing about the whole sweater. It's called Tortuga, and there are little knitted turtles making their way up both lapels. They're so cute! And also so fussy! Each turtle repeat is 50 rows. Each turtle binds off 25 edge stitches. I'm...maybe not going to think about that very hard right now.

I made my sweater a little longer than the pattern called for based on an email exchange with the designer. This means I'm knitting six turtles on each lapel, twelve turtles with their little beaded eyes.

I I fear the world's turtle population may go extinct in the time it takes me to finish these lapels. The sun might have morphed into a red dwarf at that point, and I hear that the whole dying star thing isn't optimal for healthy turtle populations. I will drag myself out under its umber light, my arthritic hands clutched around my long-awaited turtly lapels. I may be the only person alive on planet Earth, but BY GOLLY I will be the most stylish.

(The turtle in the picture still needs a beak. I was just too busy contemplating the heat death of the universe to give him one tonight.)

Fred Flintstone's New Socks

Tra la laaaa! I have finished the socks I was making for my 18yo.

He is such a sweetheart -- he understands that man-sized socks in twisted rib contain a sizable fraction of my recent leisure-time hours, and he appreciates the effort.

I ran into a minor difficulty with resizing the pattern: if you  make the pattern repeat wider, it takes longer to work through each motif. I didn't want to interrupt the pattern in the middle of a repeat (quelle horreur!), which left me with fewer options for moving from foot to toe. The result: a toe that is squarer that I might like it to be. I prefer it when sock toes taper more gradually.

But you know, if my 18yo is ever traveling in Bedrock, his square-toed socks will blend right in. Nothing else that he is wearing will blend in and-- wait, they never wore socks in Bedrock, did they? Well, IF Fred Flintstone ever winds up in Gladlyville, he will need some socks and these might work for him.

When I was in the fourth grade my family moved from Metairie, LA to a tiny town in Kentucky. It was so small that to field a marching band they recruited kids from the grade school and the junior high as well as from the high school. I started rehearsing with the band that winter, and marched with them that following summer and fall. One of our songs was the Flintstones theme. You guys, that was THIRTY-NINE years ago and I can still play the Flintstones theme song on my flute. Memory is a strange thing.

So if you spy Fred Flintstone wandering around forlornly, looking for a brontosaurus burger, point him in the direction of Gladlyville. I can play him his song, and I bet that my son, if asked nicely, will consider sharing his socks.

Terminable

Back in November I started a pair of socks for my 18yo. I thought at first that I would give them to him in time for Christmas, but I'm still having knitting mojopenia (the scientific-ish term for severely diminished but not entirely absent mojo, natch) and this pattern is really slow. For a few years there I thought I had worked enough twisted rib that I ought to be able to do it faster, but now I have reached the acceptance phase of twisted rib: it's really slow. It takes a long time; that's just the way it is.

Back in my November post I wondered if it was worth ripping back my slow and painful accretion of twisted rib to revise the pattern in a more sensible way. I bit the bullet and ripped the sock in progress, and lo I did not have a pair of socks to put under the tree for Christmas or even Epiphany. But hey: slow and steady finishes the sock even if it doesn't actually win the race, and I have finished the second foot of this pair of socks that seemed interminable. 

Next up: I have to reconstruct the decrease pattern I used for the first toe. It bears no resemblance to the toe recommended by the pattern, because I wanted to finish a pattern repeat and then I had to do an emergency-hurry-up-and-decrease-crash toe to avoid the capybara stowage situation that has confronted me in past handknit socks. (That previous capybara stowage situation was remedied effectively by a trip through the dryer.)

I'd been feeling a little worried about that improvised toe, but right in this moment I am having a surge of confidence. I can wing that sock toe so that it at-least-sort-of matches the one I wung earlier. I can weave in those ends and hand off those socks. And then? It will be a long time before I take on another twisted rib project.

The RTFM Hat

I am almost done with the hat I've been making, but I've been scratching my head about it for a while. I wondered why it was made to fit so closely. I mean, I know I have a giant head, but I still thought it was a little weird that an adult hat would be so snug on me. I also wondered, as I looked at the finished products flitting across my Ravelry feed, how the math could possibly work out for their crown stars to have six points.

Today, finally, about a hundred stitches from the end of this hat it occurred to me that those two points of puzzlement were closely related to each other. Today I went back to the pattern and realized I missed a step. In between "cast on 120 stitches for the ribbing" and "work the chart," there was a round in which I was supposed to increase my stitch count by 20%.

Well! Oops!

It's been more than a decade since Elwood introduced me to the internet abbreviation RTFM. "Read The Fine Manual," he told me it meant, and I took him at his word because when Elwood P. Gladly says a thing it is virtually certain that the thing is so. A few years later I learned that actually not everyone's manuals are fine. In our house, though, it's still Read The Fine Manual.

So. This is the hat for which I failed to RTFM. I will finish the crown tomorrow when I am slightly less disgusted. It will never fall off my head, not even once.

Bits & Pieces

It's freezing. Single-digit temperatures, big ugly wind that's pushing the "Real Feel" index way down. I was driving home this evening when I thought, "I am ready for winter to be over." And then I laughed bitterly.

In my defense, I had enough of winter today to last me for a while. I got a text late Friday afternoon from a Gladlyville mom whose son goes to school with Joe. We've carpooled before; she was making a last-minute trip to pick her son up. Would Joe like to come home too? If I had paid attention to the forecast I would have probably said "No, thank you!" instead of "Sure, and I can drive them back!" But that's what I said, so that's what I did. The scary chunk of the drive was across a section of state highway that's still showing up as "mostly covered with snow and ice" in our department of transportation's website. Blech. I get super-tense about driving my kids around in bad weather, and it is magnified when I am also driving someone else's kid around. Mercifully, we are all unscathed. I think I'll have to break out the Dr. Stay-Puft leggings for my walk to campus tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring semester classes. ("Spring" semester. Brrr.) I've posted before about professor anxiety dreams, yes? It's been years since I had that dream where I show up to the final but I've never been to class. Now I dream that I show up to the final and I forgot to write it. Or I drafted the first four questions and failed to copy them. All the students are staring at me as I walk in empty-handed. This doesn't even make sense, right? In the real world I could just set them a quick essay question and it would be fine -- if I somehow forgot to write an exam, which is approximately as likely as forgetting to put my pants on and heading out to the office. (Oh! Last semester I had a professor anxiety dream in which I showed up to teach with no pants on. "This must be a nightmare," said my dream self, only in my dream it was not a dream.)

This semester's professor anxiety dream takes the cake, though. My actual undergrad class this semester is full of students I enjoy. I've taught about two-thirds of them before and it was a delight to scroll through the roster. With my actual conscious brain I'm really looking forward to it. But Anxious Brain has other ideas. Anxious Brain spun me up a dream in which I walked into class on the first day and discovered that it was full of strangers, mostly male. (My field is so heavily female that I have taught a single-digit number of male students across the past seven years.) That's not the scary part, though: the scary part came when I realized that half of them were vampires. 

In strode the vampire slayer, with a tangle of barbecue skewers jangling at her hip (stakes, you see). She was heavily armed. Carnage ensued. I woke up saying "OKAY OKAY OKAY maybe next time you could rerun the one where I neglect to write the syllabus?!?!"

Let's talk about something more pleasant, shall we? Last night I cast on a happy soothing knit. Kate Davies has launched a new yarn, and I have a delectable little sampler pack that has been waiting for the pattern release. It's a yummy wool-mohair tweed, fingering weight with some pleasing variability and even more pleasing neps*. I am making a hat in stranded colorwork, with the added fillip of occasional purl stitches. 

*Neps are the things that make tweed tweedy: those little flecks of color you can see in this picture.

In traditional stranded colorwork there's no purling, just a long lovely spiral of two-handed knitting. I'm only familiar with purls in colorwork as part of the Swedish Bohus tradition, which is its own Thing, distinct from the Fair Isle/Icelandic/Norwegian traditions. If you're not a knitter you will be a little puzzled when I tell you I looked at the chart and said "...whoa..." but that's what I did. I'll share a picture when I'm a little farther along. (The suspense is killing you, I know. "The purl stitches, Jamie," you are saying, "show us the purl stitches!")

On that tantalizing note, I'll say goodnight.

Let's talk about something fluffy

Earlier this month Stella said to me, "Mom, do you know what a poncho is?" And I said, "Oh, honey, I was born in 1970. Of course I know what a poncho is!" 

Ponchos are back, did you know? Stella was telling me, with just a trace of envy in her voice, about a classmate's cozy poncho, and my Knitting Opportunity Sensor went WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP. Did my daughter want a poncho? I was on the case.

I flipped through Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Workshop in search of her pelerine pattern. Hers is garter stitch, knit flat, open down the front. I wanted none of those things, but I liked the shape of it. So I dug out some yummy Aran-weight hand-dyed wool, in charcoal gray shading to silver, and I cast on a hundred stitches. I worked K2P2 rib for 8 rounds, and then I switched to stockinette. Sixteen stitches from the beginning of the round I put a pair of lifted increases, and then I put another pair astride the middle two stitches of the round, and then I plopped in the final pair sixteen stitches from the end. I increased every other round until I figured I had Stella's shoulders covered, and then I switched to every third round to keep the fit a little snugger. When I estimated that I'd reached her waist, I went down a needle size and finished with 10 rounds of K4P2 rib, maintaining the increase line through the knit section of the rib. (I'll have to post a picture of that specifically when I create a Rav project. It creates a pretty fan-like corner. I love the line that lifted increases create.) I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off, which gave me a subtle and pleasing ruffly effect.

I was not at all sure that this recipe would work. I was afraid that changing the rate of the increases would give the garment a weird shape. The shade difference between the first and second skeins of yarn niggled and niggled at me. But now that it's bound off I think it's pretty cute. From the front:

From the back:

II was splicing ends as I went, so there are only two to weave in. I'll give it a gentle block tonight, and it should be dry and ready to go in time for her birthday. 

I hope she likes it. :-)

Slowly and limpingly

I haven't wanted to knit since the election. Isn't that weird? A year ago I was afraid that Donald Trump was going to steal a lot of things* from the people of this country, but I didn't expect my knitting mojo to be among them. It's been weird: I don't want to knit, don't want to run. What's that depression screener question about loss of pleasure in things you used to enjoy?

*Can you even believe this tax bill? Also, did all of us just sort of throw up our hands about the Emoluments Clause? 

Last month I decided I'd make a baby sweater for a colleague expecting her first. It's that same raglan pattern I've made a zillion times before, in cozy red superwash yarn. This is the smallest size, and I can tell you from experience that it's entirely possible to crank one out in a weekend. Instead I did a little bit here and a little bit there and whoops! -- my colleague went and had her baby while I was nibbling away at her gift. It's almost done. It needs its ends woven in and its underarm gaps closed up. I think I probably have buttons that will work for it, but I might also need to make a fabric store run. I'm taking them dinner a week from Monday. Even a slow and limping knitter can do that amount of finishing in ten days.

I am also knitting a gift for a person who occasionally reads this blog. It's one of my favorite patterns. I like my knitting to be a mix of complicated and brainless, and that pattern fits the bill perfectly. It's snappy twisted rib in which yarnovers and decreases create an unexpectedly cool effect. (I also love the pattern page, which reminds me of the years in which I waited eagerly for the new Knitty to come out and read through every single page of each issue. I'm still not sure what that disembodied leg is doing at the beach or why Cookie is wearing a wedding-ish dress, but I'm a fan regardless.) I cast on 84 stitches, and only realized after eleven rounds of the leg that I should have done six repeats of fourteen stitches each, rather than seven repeats of twelve. I'm trying to decide how crazy it would be to rip those eleven rounds. Pretty crazy, I'm thinking at this point.

My brain is doing that November thing where it says "And! We could knit a ____ for ____ in time for Christmas! S/he would like a _____! And there's plenty of time left!" I have a difficult extended family member who has made some pointed comments about my knitting in the past. As in "Oh, that's...different" about a lovely stripey cowl and "I don't understand why he never wears your gift" in a situation where I would not have known that was the case (and would have been happier not knowing). Today I caught the Delusional Knitter part of my brain making a case for knitting this person a gift. Mittens with a cool construction! Made of bulky yarn leftovers! You never know what to give this person!

Probably not, Delusional Knitter brain. Probably not.

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This is a fluffy post on a day when many people are facing devastation, so let me begin by suggesting that you consider supporting the Texas Diaper Bank or Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

Here is the fluffy part. Ysolda Teague is releasing her fourth Knitworthy collection. Every two weeks, starting today, she'll release a new pattern suitable for December gifting. In the past, these patterns have been a lot of fun: a little bit of intriguing technique-y stuff on a small canvas. The first year was great. In the second year her team offered me the patterns for free when they used my year 1 Ravelry pictures for a publicity post. Last year was mostly frustrating, though, and so far this year I have hardly been knitting at all.

Project #1 is this hat. I love fine-gauge Fair Isle knitting with a fierce and fiery kind of love. But is there anyone on my Christmas list who would wear a slouchy beanie? Slouchy beanies on my own personal head tend to have an unfortunate Jane-Curtin-as-a-Conehead kind of look. Maybe tomorrow I will do some actual math: projects completed across the three years of Knitworthy, along with their KSRs (that'd be their Knitter Satisfaction Ratings).

I'm sure you can hardly wait for me to return with my graphs.

Inching forward

I should cast on a nice sock or something. 

Right now my Rav notebook shows that I have three WIPs going: a super-tricky sweater, an unhappy fingerless mitt project, and a never-ending quilt. There's also a scarf that I haven't yet made a project page for, which should tell you something about my level of enthusiasm.

I left the super-tricky sweater in a super-tricky place: I had to pick up 137 stitches from a provisional cast-on, unpick 274 stitches' worth of provisional cast-ons from my laceweight project yarn, and graft 61 stitches in pattern. It had been in time-out for a while as I pondered those tasks. But! Last night and this morning I got it done. Now instead of a funky sleeve + back + a second funky sleeve, I have an actual bodice. And, bonus, it appears to fit my actual body!

(That red diagonal line at the top left is the cable from a circular needle. I have picked up stitches for the neckband.)

I don't often run across knitting instructions that I find intimidating. I'm usually pretty fearless about diving in and doing things in a way that suits me. But I was reading back through the eleven-page pattern, wondering if I could knit the lapels from the top down instead of the bottom up and minimize the number of stitches hanging out on waste yarn. I was pretty confident about reversing the little cabled turtle pattern, but then my brain froze up at the prospect of reversing the sort-of intarsia sort-of I-cord edge.

So! Waste yarn it is.

I am going to need some conference knitting for next week -- something happy and crankable that does not require me to graft in any stinking patterns. Any fun ideas for me?

Sweater tips from me to you

Salome Ellen did not actually ask me for any tips on making adult sweaters, but I am going to offer some anyway. If you have never made a sweater for an adult and you would like to make a sweater for an adult, here are some ideas for you:

First, consider your materials carefully. I recommend Aran-weight wool. The Aran-weight part will make for faster knitting, because there is a whole lot of surface area in any sweater that will fit an adult. I have made adult sweaters with 22 stitches per square inch and adult sweaters with 56 stitches per square inch. One of those requires more resolve than the other. I recommend wool because it is forgiving. A sweater back presents a large expanse of stockinette, and minor variations in your gauge will be more apparent in yarns that are not made from pleasantly sticky animal fibers that bloom up nicely when blocked.

Second, consider a top-down pattern. You can check fit as you go with a top-down pattern, and fix any disasters before it's too late. I've only used Ann Budd's book for one project, but I'm sure I'll do so again in the future. The spiral binding is a particularly nice touch.

Third, don't do raglan sleeves. The standard raglan sleeve recipe leaves too much fabric under the arms, so you wind up with a garment in which you could stash an extra breast or two if you found them lying by the side of the road. (Here again we sample the weirdness that arises when Jamie attempts to blog in haste. I am zipping through this post quickly, see, so I can do my yoga video for the day. In the pursuit of inner peace I am going to natter on about dismembered body parts. Right. Moving on now.) I like a nice set-in sleeve myself.

This is really a postscript to the first paragraph even though it is the fourth position counting from the top, so what does that make it? Firth? Fourst? I suggest that you not succumb to the variegated yarn temptation and even that you think carefully about the semisolid yarn temptation. Fabric made from variegated yarn will have a serious "made by hand" look to it. The world is full of beautiful variegated yarn; I get it. But I have come to think that it is most suitable for patting fondly in yarn shops and then returning to its hanger. Semisolid yarn will be less emphatic in its "my mother made this for me" proclamation, but it will proclaim nonetheless.

Fifth, I find sweater knitting most fun when I can clear the decks and just make that sweater. Long lingering sweater projects create all kinds of avoidable hassles. Moths. Lost materials. Surprising changes in gauge from one year to the next. Bulky sweater pieces lying around in overstuffed project bags. My favorite way to knit a sweater is to find a pattern that totally sucks me in and then run with it. There are so many fun ways to make a handknit sweater distinctive and beautiful. (I still love this back detail.)

But also, sixth, don't settle. If you aren't happy with that bound-off edge it will bug you every single time you wear the sweater. Ask me how I know. A sweater is a substantial investment of time and often of money. Leave time to get the finishing right.

Seventh, on the subject of just-right finishing, I have a BO recommendation for you. A knitted BO will be too firm for a buttonband but Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy BO will be too floppy. Instead of going up a needle size I have just discovered something that works nicely: I bind off the knit stitches traditionally and use JSSBO for the purl stitches. I avoid the awkward reverse YOs and the floppiness at the same time. Try it and tell me what you think!

It's a knitting conundrum

There's a Jodie Gordon Lucas design I have wanted to knit for ages, but it's a daunting project. I cast it on last summer and made one shoulder + sleeve, but it sat in a project bag all winter because I thought I had to graft in pattern to finish the cuff. When I pulled it out again last month I realized that it was plain vanilla stockinette grafting, a 20-minute task at the outside. I knocked it out and cast on the second shoulder.

I suppose it's inevitable that a laceweight sweater will be A Project, but this one is a Really For Real Super-Gigunda Project. (Huh, spellcheck balks at laceweight but passes meekly by super-gigunda. Go figure.) The pattern is 11 pages long, with 5 separate lace charts. There is grafting in pattern all over the place. For the non-knitters, if you have not already gone skipping away to read about something more interesting like drying paint, that's hardcore. The construction is different from anything I've ever made before: first you make yourself a suspender, and then you knit a little jutting bridge out from one side of the suspender, and then you graft your bridge (in pattern!) to the far side of the suspender to make an underarm. After you unbend your brain, you pick up stitches from the underarm piece and knit yourself a sleeve. Here, look:

That represents a lot of hours of my life right there. (It will be prettier once I block it. Lace always looks like a crumpled heap of nothing in particular before you block it. It will be considerably longer once I block it as well, because it's alpaca yarn. Alpaca grows like nobody's business.)

Today I was planning to graft my underarm bridge on the other side, but I discovered that I did not follow the pattern when I made last summer's underarm bridge. I am trying to remember: did I think it was a good idea to make a shorter bridge? Was I so focused on GRAFTING IN PATTERN FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER that I hyperventilated and forgot how to count to 29? I think the answer is probably B.

At first I thought I might just leave one underarm bridge longer than the other. No one is ever going to walk up to me and say, "Please, may I count the rows in your underarm bridge?" And unpicking rows in laceweight alpaca is not my favorite task. I thought at first I'd rather live with a minor asymmetry, but I think I've changed my mind.

The thing I can't quite predict, the uncertainty that's making me a little reluctant to proceed, is how to optimize fit for a sweater with such an unusual construction. I am still wondering if I should have opted for the second size instead of the first. (I am still having the same problem I always have with sweater fit.) (Oh, goodness, look at baby Stella in that old post!) I don't know if you can see the brighter yarn at the edge of the shoulder/sleeve piece, but it's a provisional cast-on that I will unpick later. Because it's a crochet chain, it doesn't have the same amount of give as the knitted fabric, making it harder to estimate how the fabric will lie once the crochet chain is out of the picture. I can't quite tell if I am going to need more coverage. I could conceivably make the turtle lapel a little wider, (conceivably) (maybe) (with a shot of vodka under my belt except that would probably be a bad idea given the demands of this pattern) but the prospect of modifying this particular complicated pattern makes me nervous.

You know, maybe I should just email the designer. We've been on an email list together for years and years now, and if I say, "Jodie, what would you suggest that a busty person with skinny arms do about making her Tortuga fit nicely?" she will probably have good ideas for me. I'm sure you can't wait for me to report back.

All over but the buttons

Last night I cast off the neck on that little baby sweater, and this morning I picked up stitches for the buttonband. While I read to Stella I closed up the little armpit holes you always get with a raglan sweater, and wove in the ends. 

I was going to pick up buttons when I went to the gym to work out, but I was shanghai-ed by the bunyip. I was going to swim, see, but my bathing suit is missing. I hung it over the edge of the tub on Thursday night, and I can only conclude that our bunyip reeeeaaaaached up out of the bathroom vent to snatch it up in his drooling jaws. I wish I knew why our bunyip loved Lycra so. I suppose it's better than a taste for human flesh BUT STILL.

So I was very distracted while packing for the gym, because I kept thinking of implausible places where the bathing suit might have gone and zipping off to investigate them. I discovered at the gym that I had forgotten to take a sports bra; I decided to run anyway. Thankfully nobody lost an eye in the aftermath of that decision, but afterward I was too sweaty to countenance putting my street clothes on again. And I didn't feel comfortable going to Joann's in sweaty skimpy running clothes. (Oh, look, here I am being weird about body stuff again. I'll post a picture of myself in that cute little running skirt on the internet, but I won't go into Joann's while wearing it because I used to have a student who worked at Joann's.) "I'll take the kids out for Laetare Sunday ice cream after dinner," I told my sweaty self, "and pick up a card of buttons on the way home."

I had forgotten, though that Joann's closes at 7 on Sundays. No buttons for me, but it was a really fun outing with happy kids so I can't complain too vehemently. And I do think the sweater will be darling. Don't you agree?

Now if I can just persuade the bunyip to barf up my bathing suit.