Light and Momentary

A knitting post

You know what we haven't talked about in a long time? Knitting, that's what. This is because knitting has not been bringing me very much joy lately.

Let me show you the things I have been stuck on, and perhaps it will get me unstuck.I can't remember -- did I show you the rectangularized pandemic blanket? Google tells me that I did, back before the ends were woven in. The thing I have been stuck on is deciding whether it needs a border. It has been niggling at me. But as of this weekend I have officially decided that it does not need a border, or at least not in this stage of its existence. We will call it finished, though it may be a temporary flavor of finished. It is so cozy and hefty and pleasing on chilly days. It is less useful in the 90-degree weather we have been having recently.

Here is another pandemic project, which I am going to rename the Make The Best Of It stole. I bought the kit during my fall 2020 sabbatical, right after I submitted paper #2.

I was hoping it would be a fluffy cloud of medium-challenging lacy goodness. I loved the idea of subtle striping and interspersed stockinette panels and two different lace patterns, because all of those things break up the monotony that is baked into a sizable lace stole. But there are a bunch of unsatisfactory things about it:

1. a chart with mistakes in it
2. sections of true lace knitting (i.e., pattern on both sides) with directional decreases. BLEH, SSPs are the WORST decrease and they ABOUND in this stole.
3. an unpredictable pattern in the easier lace sections
4. colors that aren't quite me and that don't quiiiiite work with each other (to my admittedly picky eye) because of pandemic supply chain issues
5. instructions from the designer to do the hardest parts in the yarns with halo -- a recipe for eyestrain for this middle-aged knitter
6. a lace pattern that looks like marching ladybugs, in a creepy-crawly way and not in a charming way
7. failure on the designer's part to throw in any right-side purl stitches, so it is going to curl like nobody's business after I am done investing all these hours in it

So for...hm...20 months now I have been working on it grumpily for a while and then stuffing it into the Timeout Bag when the eyestrain gets too annoying. But I am only 150 rows from the end. I will feel happier if it is done than if it is wadded up in the Timeout Bag, so I will keep nibbling away at it.

Here is still another pandemic project, because this stinking pandemic has been going on for so long that all of my current knitting is pandemic knitting:

This was the third project in Ysolda Teague's 2020 Colourwork Club, and it is a pain. So much finishing. I never get Second Sock Syndrome but I have a whopping case of Second Mitten Syndrome going on here. Maybe it's First Mitten Syndrome, because I keep picking up the first mitten, thinking about how little I want to deal with the finishing (the lining + flip-top combo (shown below) is a nice idea, but it's going to mean a bunch of annoying tidying up), and setting it back down again. Maybe I will take the first mitten to jury duty tomorrow, where they say I cannot have knitting needles but make no mention of tapestry needles.

Next up there are these socks, which have been waiting for a month to have their four ends woven in after spending more than a year on the needles. That is a long time to procrastinate on a 10-minute task.

There is one not-knitting project, a little crocheted amigurumi fox. My niece picked out an amigurumi kit for me a few Christmases ago, and in August of 2020 (again with the lingering projects from the early months of the pandemic!) I made its head and nose and one ear. The trouble with crocheting is that I do it so infrequently that I always have to restart slowly and painstakingly, giving it my full attention. In the past few days I have added a body and a tail to my small collection of fox parts. We shall see how it goes. The jury duty guidelines don't say anything about crochet hooks either.

And then there is the last project, the Extremely Nascent Sweater Back Laden With Sad Memories. It is also from the fall semester of 2020, when Marie's roommate got COVID and I was overflowing with mom worry. I could not speed up vaccine production, I could not make either of their immune systems work any more efficiently, but BY GUM I could plan to swathe my child in Scottish wool.

And then Marie's roommate got better and Marie did not come down with COVID and I thought to myself, "Do I really want to knit an entire sweater on size 3 needles? And does Marie really want a sweater that will have to be hand-washed or dry-cleaned?" And now, 20 months later, I do not remember exactly where I was going with this sweater back. I was using Ann Budd's book of top-down sweaters, but there will be a fair amount of face-scrunching and head-scratching required if I am going to pick up where I left off, or perhaps switch it over into a sweater for me, since I don't mind hand-washing hand-knits and these colors suit me better than they suit Marie. 

Maybe I'll just frog it, huh? What's your vote -- frog pond or face-scrunching?

AFO (stands for Almost Finished Object)

Look at what I bound off today:

This is the Stephen West MKAL that I started in the fall. As you might guess from the number of color changes, I have a lot of ends to weave in. A lot a lot.

Here is a closer view of the diamond section:

This was the section where my will to knit was slowly eroded by the ever-increasing length of those purl rows. The border section was an ocean of garter stitch, capped with an I-cord bind-off on >900 stitches. (All the knitters wince in sympathy.) All in all, the painful level on this one was pretty high. But hey, it's almost finished.

You too can make a pandemic blanket

MomQueenBee commented on my pandemic blanket a few days ago, so this is a post about how to make your own. Take a big pile of worsted-weight leftovers in colors that make you happy. You can also combine sportweight or DK with a strand of fingering if you want more variety, or you can throw in some Aran-weight yarn too. It's flexible.

Start with a mitered square. Cast on 51 stitches (I recommend a long-tail cast-on) and knit back. Knit 24, S2KP, knit 24; turn and knit back. On the next row you'll knit 23, S2KP, knit 23; turn and knit back. On every right-side row, you'll decrease across the three middle stitches. When you're down to one stitch, break the yarn and pull it through the stitch.

To make another square, you will build on your initial square by picking up an odd number of stitches along one side. Let's say I want my second square to be a little smaller: I can pick up 19 stitches, turn my knitting around, and use the cable cast-on to add an additional 18 stitches. After I knit back to my starting point I'll do just the same thing as before, decreasing across the three middle stitches on every right-side row. If I want my decrease line to point in the opposite direction, I can use long-tail cast-on to create my 18 new stitches before I pick up 19 from the existing square. Flexible! So flexible! 

You can also make a mitered rectangle; just bind off your leftover stitches after you have consumed all the stitches on the shorter side. In the picture above, I am knitting a mitered rectangle. Here, I'll add in a close-up so you can see for yourself. In just a couple of ridges, I will have decreased all the stitches on the right side of the decrease line. I'll stop there, and bind off the rest. It will be easier to pick up the next whack of stitches if you use a larger needle for the bind-off. You can make squares or stripes without the diagonal decrease line if you would like to do so: just work plain garter ridges. Combine shapes that please you with colors that please you until your blanket is a size that pleases you. I think I will work a crochet edging because my brain might wither and crumble into dust if I tried to do that many feet of applied I-cord.

This post at MDK contains the picture that inspired me, and if the loosey-goosey-ness of these instructions makes you unhappy, you might find some of Kay and Ann's patterns to be a soothing alternative. Their first book has a couple of different garter stitch blankets with more structured patterns, and they have reworked some of those ideas in their more recent publications. Happy knitting!

A 2020 Ornament

This morning I was talking to an old friend who is in the middle of some hard things. I cannot do anything about the work stuff or the family stuff or the health stuff, but my ears pricked up when she said she had been looking unsuccessfully for a Christmas ornament: she wanted a Santa Claus wearing a mask.

That is a problem I can solve.

I am going to add a pompon to the top of his hat, and I have a bunch of ends to weave in. But he's almost done.

Pete wants me to make one for our tree too, and I think I will extend the mask a little higher (even Santa needs to cover his nose) and make it slightly less rectangular.

I started to write out the pattern, but I got to the short-row section of the beard and the pattern degenerated into "and then I kind of wung it; you can too." I'll pay closer attention next time.

This is not a post about baby hiccups

I had planned to post about knitting progress today, but I accidentally posted a time capsule instead. I republished a post from 2004 when Miriel asked on Twitter for cranberry baking recommendations. Instead of "publish on..." I clicked "publish now." This resulted in a post dated today, chronicling my trip to the zoo with friends and speculating about whether Pete was already having in utero hiccups. As you might imagine, a post about my 20-week pregnancy sparked some confusion. So! If you need cranberry recipes, they should now appear in the correct decade's archives. (I can recommend both the cranberry cake and the cranberry-dried cherry bars (scroll down to #7).) Let us now discuss knitting progress.

Do you remember that I was doing a Stephen West mystery knit-along? I should have known that it would be hard to keep up with the weekly pattern releases, because he told us up front that we needed 500g of fingering weight yarn. That is 1.24 miles of yarn, worked on 3.25mm needles. I was never going to get that finished in a month.

This pattern seems to be focused on exploring fun if not especially cohesive things you can do with slipped stitches. The middle section was a blast, but it has become less fun. The thing about big shawls is that the further you go, the more endless rows of purling are required. Current stitch count: 467 and growing. It's a lot of acreage.

That honeycomb section in the middle is supposed to lie flat, but it is rolling like the dickens. I suspect it will continue to roll even after I smack it around with a steam iron, because it's all stockinette. This is the downside to a mystery knit-along; you can't say to yourself, "You know, I'm going to edge this section with garter stitch so it doesn't roll like all the ones I'm seeing on Ravelry."

Its recipient is enthusiastic, even if its knitter is a little less so at the moment. I still have to finish the checks, the triangles, and the chevrons. I am trying to decide whether the hot pink should reappear for the triangles, the chevrons, or maybe both. I will report back.

Totally fun to knit

I am doing a Stephen West mystery knit-along -- my third -- but I haven't really been enjoying it. I'm behind, so I've been avoiding the Ravelry chat about the pattern, which is part of the fun. I've been having some repetitive strain issues, and one side of the first clue is a tricksy combination of stripes, I-cord, and slipped stitches that messed with my tension in a way I would like to go back and fix. "This is not very fun to knit," I thought to myself. This was a bummer, because "totally fun to knit" could be the hashtag for the Stephen West projects in my Ravelry notebook.

But I have been thinking of the shawl as a birthday gift, and birthdays do not move to accommodate repetitive strain injuries, so I buckled down and finished the first clue with occasional Yosemite Sam swearing moments. Tonight I started the second section, and it is magical. "I am going to knit this FOREVER," I said to myself. "This is the BEST BEST BEST," said some primal part of my brain as it was flooded with dopamine. "Even if it DOES cause Donald Trump to be re-elected," said a part of my brain with a tenuous grasp on logic, "it would almost be worth it." "NOPE, TOO FAR," said all the rest of my brain in emphatic unison. 

I don't know what it is about his patterns, but they make me weirdly happy. The products are often kind of strange, but the process is a joy. Here's a picture for you so you can appreciate the strangeness (and we're just beginning! so much strangeness to come, I have no doubt). As for me, I'm off to knit.

 

Things I have been making

Hurray for a pleasant restful day, in which I chatted with friends and 2 out of 3 faraway kids.

I finished the purple socks and cast on a new pair immediately in a different Zauberball yarn, softer but also a little splittier.

Pete asked if I would bake a Madeira cake. I wasn't sure how much the kids would like it, because it's a little old-fashioned. I tend to make cakes that are fluffier. And this one didn't even rise very high. It's a Nigella Lawson recipe and I think it's under-leavened. I'm not sure how she got the picture in the cookbook with the amount of leavening in the recipe, but life is full of mysteries. In any case, I was not serving it to Paul Hollywood, and so no one but me commented on its un-domed top. The kids thought it was perfect.

I went in search of American recipes to see if my leavening suspicions were warranted, and I found another of life's small mysteries. Converting British baking recipes is a bit of an art because their baking powder is different from ours. "Martha Stewart," said I to myself. "Sounds like a trustworthy source for an American version. I'll check out her recipe."

"Huh," I said to myself, "there is no leavening at all in her recipe. That sounds disastrous!"

And lo, there are a number of angry reviewers saying, "This was disgusting! This was an expensive buttery brick! If I had smacked my neighbor upside the head with this cake it would have ended our years-long feud over the overgrown property-line forsythia!" Much to my surprise, there was also a contingent of happy reviewers, saying, "What's the matter with you whiners that you couldn't bake this easy-peasy cake? It was delicious and perfect!"

So...were the reviewers in group B using self-raising flour by mistake? If so, wouldn't it have been too salty, since the recipe calls for a half-teaspoon of salt? Or...is unleavened cake a thing? I am usually a to-each-her-own kind of baker, but I have to say that would be a weird and penitential kind of cake. Way back in 2002 I made my second child a third birthday cake in which I failed to notice that I was using all-purpose flour where the recipe called for self-raising flour. So I can tell you from sad experience: cake is better with leavening.

Let's talk about something else now

I have had the happiest knitting project on the go for the past two weeks. I took Pete to the friendly local yarn shop and we had ourselves an efficient and socially-distant but also thoroughly enjoyable browse through the German sock yarn. (German sock yarn = the BEST sock yarn.) He chose one I'd never seen before, a Schoppel-Wolle Jeans Ball. It's great to work with, it wouldn't dream of splitting, the color ranges from fully saturated to pleasingly speckled, and it's substantial but not scratchy. All the thumbs up on this yarn. Look, I am almost done with his socks, which are a nicer purple than this picture suggests:

I am a recent convert to toe-up socks. I'd made them before, but only recently did they become my go-to pattern-free pattern. Would you like a toe-up sock recipe? We aim to please around here. This recipe assumes you are using magic loop or two circs, but you can certainly adapt for DPNs if you prefer.

Using Judy's Magic Cast-On, start with 20 stitches divided across two needles. Increase every other round, one stitch in from each edge of each needle, until you have 60 stitches divided across two needles. Work in stockinette until this fetal sock is about three inches shorter than the foot for which you are knitting it. This is the part that used to worry me, but fear not-- it is not an exact science. Now make your gusset. Is there a side that is less pleasing to you? Make that the sole side and increase every other round on that needle, one stitch in from each edge of the needle. For an average-sized woman's sock, keep going until that needle has 48 stitches (78 in total across both needles). If you're working an average-sized men's sock you'll want about 54 stitches on the gusset needle, or 84 in total across both needles. 

Next comes the only fiddly part, the heel. You're going to work a little tongue of fabric on the middle 16 stitches (or the middle 18 stitches for a men's sock; that's what all the parenthetical numbers in this paragraph and the next one are for). So knit 32 (or 36), turn, slip 1 and purl 15 (or 17), turn, slip 1 and knit 15 (or 17), and keep going just like that on the middle segment for 8 (or 10) total rows. Now for the curved bit: knit until you have two stitches left on the needle, then wrap and turn, slipping the stitch right next to the wrapped one before you start purling your way back to the last two stitches. Here again you will wrap and turn, and again you will slip the stitch right next to the wrapped one. You'll keep going in this fashion, each time wrapping the stitch right next to the one you slipped last time, until you have 3 (or 4) wraps in each direction. Knit across, working each wrapped stitch together with its wrap. Pick up and knit 5 (or 6) stitches in the slipped stitches at the edge of your fabric tongue. Slip 1 and purl back, working each wrapped stitch together with its wrap. Pick up and purl 5 (or 6) stitches at the opposite edge of your fabric tongue. Phew! That's the end of the hard part!*

Now you'll make your heel flap, working back and forth across the middle 26 (or 30) stitches and gobbling up gusset stitches as you go. Alternate slip 1, knit 1 across all of those middle stitches until you get to the last stitch before the gap, and SSK across the gap. Slip 1 and purl across to the last stitch before the gap; p2tog across the gap. Repeat these two rows until your decreases have consumed all of your gusset stitches. I like to scoot a stitch from each end of the other needle over to this needle and work one last pair of heel flap rows, because gusset holes make me sad.

And now! Tra-la-la! You're back in the round. Work one plain round and then work the ribbing of your choosing until the length is right for you. Bind off and wave your sock around for all to admire. Bind-off note: for my big kids I use JSSBO and I go up a needle size. For my own socks I just use the stretchy bind-off. Bigger feet seem to require a looser BO.

*If my instructions are confusing, it may help to read the pattern from which I learned to knit a toe-up flap heel. If you're still confused, I've also had success with this toe-up short-row heel.

May 18

I am working steadily on the lockdown blanket, and it has been growing apace. (Well, we might need to define "apace" loosely for the purposes of this post.) 

Two weeks ago:

And here's tonight's version:

Here, let me show you the couch for scale:

I want it to be big enough to wrap up in on a chilly winter day, so I have quite a bit more knitting to do. It is a hefty thing-- it will probably weigh three pounds when I am done with it. 

If you are able to zoom in on the couch picture (it is a sign of the times that I had to go back and un-capitalize "zoom"), you might be able to see a notebook page with a column of numbers and a graph. I was trying to figure out how the math works for stitch counts per square based on starting side length. Almost all of the squares in this blanket are mitered, so if I pick up 40 stitches on one side of the square, the first two rows will each be 79 stitches long (40 on the first side + 1 center stitch + 40 on the second side - 2 stitches consumed in the double decrease) and the next two will each be 77 stitches long.

I am mostly using up odds and ends of worsted- and Aran-weight yarn for this project, though I seem to be constitutionally incapable of getting through any project designed to use up leftovers without buying a little more yarn. The result of using odds and ends of yarn to knit up squares of varying size? A lot of yarn chicken. "Sure," I think to myself, "I can knit a 25-stitch square with this blob of yarn. Looks about right." And you know, sometimes I'm exactly right. But sometimes I'm biting my nails. WILL I MAKE IT? WILL I HAVE TO KNIT THE LAST ROWS OF THIS SQUARE IN A DIFFERENT COLOR? CAN YOU STAND THE SUSPENSE? 

Math to the rescue: it only took a few minutes of looking at the numbers to see that it was a quadratic function, and a few minutes more to figure out the details: if I cast on x stitches per side, the square will eventually contain 2x²-1 stitches. This way, see, I can knit up a quick 50 stitches and chuck them on the scale, and I can tell in advance whether I have enough yarn to finish the square I'm planning. 

...I am suddenly and self-consciously aware that this is a super SUPER niche post, and that the Venn diagram of "people who sketch out quadratic functions in their bullet journals" and "people who like to read knitting posts" might look like this:

So! Happy reading! If I were not in the middle of a May blogging streak this post would go straight into drafts, but here we are.

They're terribly comfortable

My husband has been asking me for a while to make a mask for him. I had gotten as far as googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, but today I bit the bobbin and whipped* one up.

*if in your idiolect "whipped" means "spent an uninterrupted 80 minutes completing while growing increasingly exasperated."

I read a blog post this afternoon from someone who has so far donated 300 masks. Three! hundred! masks! 

If you have also been googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, I can recommend this one. I used ordinary cotton broadcloth from my fabric stash. At my husband's request I also added a nose support. I made a small casing at the bridge of the nose. I took some fine wire from the craft shelf, and recruited a kid to get the electrical tape and make me a small bundle with the ends carefully secured.

A big chunk of the reason it took me 80 minutes is that I don't have a dedicated sewing space. Usually my sewing machine lives on the back steps. Have we talked about the back steps recently? Long ago our house had a separate apartment upstairs, and they used a separate staircase and entrance. These days I store yarn, sewing supplies, and wrong-sized kids' clothes on one side of the back steps, with the other side kept clear so we could use the stairs in an emergency. But it is not very convenient to collect the sewing machine, the iron, the pincushion, the shears, the thread, the elastic, and the fabric, bringing them up one staircase and down the other and clearing a spot for them in the dining room. If I am going to be making a bunch of masks, I would prefer to find a better system.

I have sometimes thought that when our nest gets a little emptier I might turn the smallest upstairs bedroom into a crafting space, but our nest is SO FULL right now, SO SO FULL.

We have robins nesting in a spot I can see from this seat and I am going to be grateful that I did not have to build this nest with a beak and no thumbs. We have considerably more square footage per resident than the robins do, and no rain falling on the occupants.

Wait, I just had an idea. MAYBE if I move a stack of notebooks out of the server in the dining room, then MAYBE my sewing machine could fit in that space temporarily. AND THEN it would be out of sight when I wasn't sewing masks, and convenient when I decided to sew. But the sewing machine might also be too tall.

I will report back. I am sure the suspense will be weighing on you.

I have been making some things that are silver and black

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get from "oh, that looks like an interesting knit" to "hey, I have finished knitting that thing." Kate Davies published her Sheep Carousel tea cozy pattern way back in 2012. She offered a free pattern to newsletter subscribers a few years later, and I picked that one as my freebie. But I didn't cast it on until June of last year, and I am still not quite finished. 

I've done all the knitting, but I still have to tack down my steek facings and weave in the ends. The picture shows the unblocked version. Those sheep are already less wonky as I type this post. 

I found the fun:drudgery ratio fairly unfavorable for this project. I wanted to learn how to work those Latvian braids, but they are a pain. I don't love stranded colorwork with long floats, but you can probably tell just by looking that there are a bunch of long floats in this project. And applied I-cord is the most boring form of knitting. You have to pay attention, so you can't, like, read to a child at the same time because she will complain that you are paying too much attention to your knitting. But it's so slow and repetitive that if you're not careful your brain might melt and slide out of your skull, like that guy at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark only internally and without the ideological concerns.

The third of my three Colourwork Club parcels landed in my mailbox at the beginning of the month. This project is mittens, but not just any mittens. They have a tricky Estonian braided cast-on (I was a little worried when Ysolda herself said the cast-on took her a few tries), an afterthought thumb, an optional flip-top, and an I-cord button loop. Oh, and a contrasting lining! 

As with the other club projects, the yarn is really nice. It's a toothy Norwegian yarn, DK weight for the exterior of the mittens and light fingering for the lining. The opportunity to play with new Norwegian yarns has been one of the most fun parts of the club membership. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the colors and textures quite as much as I have. Even in this kit, the neutral kit, I find the colors deeply pleasing -- the golden brown in particular is a rich toasty color, like pumpkin bread. I almost want to eat it (ed. note: but maybe that's just because I was drafting this paragraph at 10:25pm on Good Friday). 

There was a glitch somewhere in the pattern-writing, and it caused the color-coding to be reversed across most but not all of the print pattern. So technically I was supposed to make the mittens with a silver background for the palm and a black background for the back of the hand, but I did it the other way around. I am not too worried that the knitting police will smite me for failing to read the fine print.

It seems a little less pressing to finish these mittens as the temperatures rise, but on the other hand it's nice to have a portable project for warmer days. The last time I made a pair of Ysolda mitts it took me months to finish them because there were so many stinking details there at the end. So here's hoping that either these are less fiddly or that my level of motivation is higher. So far my experience of the pandemic is not characterized by an abundance of motivation, but I suppose we'll see how it goes.

Fluffy

Whew, my smart husband who is not usually given to discussing small-tail possibilities is taking the coronavirus very seriously. Should we maybe talk about knitting instead?

I got the second installment from the Colourwork Club in the mail earlier this week, after a pretty ridiculous amount of anticipatory happiness. Would it be the Vibrant colorway or the Neutral colorway? (You can pick a single colorway in advance if you want to, but Alex gave me the one-of-each membership. Next month will be Neutral.) I received an electronic version of the pattern before the parcel arrived, and I pored over it in advance. I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

Many knitwear designers sketch out "snowflake" designs with eightfold symmetry. This has long bothered me. This hat design had a six-pointed snowflake at the crown, but only in size M. I can make a size M work for almost anything, friends, but headgear is an exception. I have a giant whopping head. It is an XXXL head. I used to feel somewhat self-conscious about this configuration but now I just say it is for holding all of my brains. (Because people in this country love smart women, as evidenced by Elizabeth Warren's -- oh, wait. Never mind about that right now.) But the largest size would yield up a 7-point snowflake. Team SCIENCE and Team CLOTHES-THAT-FIT waged a brief war inside my brain, but my math-loving children told me about the existence of theoretical seven-point crystals and OKAY I cast on the largest size. On the recommended needles, because I thought it likely that this would give me a looser gauge than the designer.

But...do you know what happens if you cast on a giant hat at a slightly larger-than-recommended gauge? Yarn crisis, that's what. I pulled out the kitchen scale and weighed my shrinking ball of blue yarn at regular intervals. I threw in a bonus stripe in Exactly Right Acid Green to save a little more blue for the crown. I switched to smaller needles and started the crown decreases a little earlier than the pattern told me to. 

I think it is going to work out. Coronavirus may shutter our schools and sicken our elderly and deplete our 401Ks (seriously, WSJ, I feel like every coronavirus headline in your paper is about the economic impact and not the human suffering and epidemiological uncertainty), but at least I should have a charming Elsa-blue hat to wear to the apocalypse.

Bright Spot

For Christmas Alex gave me a membership in Ysolda Teague's Colorwork Club. She is probably my favorite knitwear designer: I think she does a fantastic job blending traditional elements and innovative approaches, and I often learn something new and fun when I make one of her designs. 

At the beginning of February, on a notably gray and discouraging day, I pulled a parcel out of the mailbox. I frowned at it, because I was feeling pretty frowny on that particular day, and then I saw the label. I ripped it open before I even took my coat off, and it was a most excellent antidote for that recalcitrant case of frownosis. 

Packed inside were 5 50g skeins of yummy Norwegian yarn, squooshy and lavender-scented. Two were oatmeal-colored, two were a fabulous rich reddish-orange, and one was a lovely blue-gray-green shade. There was a beautifully produced print pattern booklet and a download code.

This first pattern is for a cowl called Brunstane. I love cowls. I once read an Iditarod champion's assertion that keeping your neck warm is the key to winter comfort, because so much of your blood supply flows through your neck. Is this true? I do not know. Do I wear a cowl almost every day in the winter as I trudge to and from work in the snow and ice and sleet? You bet I do.

The Colorwork Club is aimed at people who are new to colorwork, so it is a simple 8-stitch repeat. It's fun and rhythmic, and I've been inching my way through it while Stella and I work our way through The Lord of the Rings. ("How do you like The Two Towers, Stella?" asked a sibling. "It's pretty landscape-y," she said, but we should get to the White Rider chapter tomorrow and I can't wait.) It's making a delicious fabric. I decided to go down a needle size, since Ysolda seems to be a tighter knitter than I am, and I wanted a cowl that was sturdy enough not to flop down around my clavicles. I need my ENTIRE NECK to stay warm when the north wind doth blow.

Yesterday, though, I hit a snag. Do you see this picture of winter happiness -- cozy knitting, happy reading, and the aforementioned print pattern?

I looked at the pattern to figure out where to start the next round, and my entire brain froze up. It was as if Lewis Carroll had sneaked in from beyond the grave to swap out my pattern for one of the White Queen's. I kept tracing my finger up and down the end-of-round column of stitches, and feeling utterly baffled about why it was in the wrong place. Had I started the chart too soon? I felt confident that I could avoid that particular mistake even dead-drunk or delirious, but the evidence was right there in front of my eyes: my cowl didn't match the chart. I set it aside and came back to it hours later, but I was still flummoxed.

Finally in desperation I picked up the booklet to flip it to the facing page, at which point I realized that it was upside down. The chart has vertical symmetry (which is why I didn't notice the error) but not left-right symmetry. (I am guessing you probably did not look at the pattern booklet in the picture and say, "What?! That's upside down!" even though it is still upside down.)

There's much to be said for print pattern booklets on nice paper, but at least electronic patterns don't rotate themselves 180° when you're not paying attention.

I love to see the inside of stranded knitting. It reminds me of the long-ago Scots who looked at a persistent problem (it's really cold on the North Sea) and found a solution (two strands are warmer than one) that is both effective and a joy to produce. I am not sure how many people share my enthusiasm for wrong-side fabric, but perhaps it's a larger group than you'd think. Alex went to two different textile museums while he was in Malaysia and Indonesia. "I just really like interesting textiles," he explained. In case you too like interesting textiles, here's some wrong-side fabric for your delectation.

'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.