Ruthless Knitting Archive

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I’m armed with a bevy of excuses regarding why I haven’t posted for a while, but instead I will tell you why I am posting today: I have a head cold. A seven-months-pregnant woman with a head cold is a frightfully uncomfortable woman, I must say, and I didn’t get very much sleep last night. Consequently, I cut myself some slack today and spent a good portion of my time sleeping and laying about. And then I thought, jeez, if I can’t get a blog post up today, when can I do it? So here we are.

First, an announcement: i have been busily reincarnating this website in a new location. From now on, all Ruthless Knitting posts will appear at http://ruthlessknitting.com, rather than here at the rather more awkward http://ruthlessknitting.ruthlessediting.com. Meanwhile, all the old posts and such will remain in place. Please update your RSS feeds and bookmarks and check out the site in its new location! i’ve done my best to get everything running smoothly over there; do let me know if you find any bugs. There will be new content over there quite shortly.

Okay, on to the good stuff. I have finished a baby kimono, and lo, it is cute. (Apologies for the rather sub-par pictures: I had to send my good camera in for repairs, and I didn’t have the skills to take non-blurry pictures with my brother’s camera, which I borrowed for these photos.) 

Pattern: One-Piece Baby Kimono by Cristina Shiffman for Mason-Dixon Knitting

Size: Newborn-ish (16" chest, 4" to underarm, 5" sleeve to underarm)

Yarn: Blackberry Ridge Wool/Silk Laceweight (25 percent silk, 75 percent wool; 350 yds per 2 oz. skein) in Deep Red for body, held double; leftover Kona Superwash sock yarn for I-cord

Yardage: 1 skein, slightly over 2 oz.

Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI

Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) bamboo straights for body, US 3 (3.25 mm) bamboo double-points for I-cord

Gauge: About 21 sts and 26 rows = 4" in St st

Notes: When I had about two inches left of knitting to do on the teensy sleeve of the orange-and-white-striped baby cardigan, I was struck by a strong urge to knit something — anything — else. So I whipped up this little baby kimono as a gift for my friend Martha’s baby, who was born preterm and therefore can be expected to be small enough to wear it for much of the winter.

I modified the pattern slightly because I thought the garter-stitch version would be too thick for my taste. Instead, I used garter stitch only for an edging and kept the rest of the sweater in Stockinette. I followed the directions for yarnover increases because I like the little line of holes this makes along the front, and I omitted sewing on two ribbons, choosing instead to do a single I-cord tie in a contrasting color.

It wasn’t until I had knit about two-thirds of the sweater that it occurred to me that one skein of laceweight yarn might not actually be enough to get the job done. As it happens, I had enough yarn to finish the body — just — but not enough to seam the sweater or to make the I-cord ties. Thankfully, I had some nice deep red leftover Kona yarn in my stash that I used for the ties, which I think gives the sweater a little something extra special.

(Interestingly, when I made a Baby Norgi sweater for Martha’s firstborn, I came so close to running out of yarn that I had to use the little leftover bits from weaving in the ends to finish the second sleeve. Something about knitting for Martha makes me improvident, it seems.)

All in all, this was a fun and simple pattern, and I can see why so many hundreds of these kimonos have been made. 

This morning, David and I rode our bikes to the farmer’s market and bought tomatoes and basil, as well as some other lovely vegetables. When we got home, I started making pesto. Today was the third Saturday in a row that I have made pesto. I’m trying to put enough in the freezer to get us through most of the winter, but we’re eating it almost as quickly as I’m making it, so it’s hard to stay ahead.

Here are two of my favorite recipes for pesto, as well as an excellent tomato sauce recipe. The first recipe makes a zingy, unbelievably tasty vegan pesto. I highly recommend it. (Pictured on the left above.)

Pesto Perfecto
From Mark Reinfeld and Bo Rinaldi, Vegan Fusion World Cuisine
makes 1 c.

1 c. basil, tightly packed
1/4 c. cashews, macadamia, or pine nuts (I like to use cashews)
1/4 to 1/2 c. olive oil (1/4 c. seems like enough to me)
2 Tbsp. lemon juice, fresh squeezed (I have also used lime juice with success)
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp. soy sauce, or to taste
1/2 tsp. sea salt, or to taste
pinch cayenne pepper

Place all ingredients in blender or food processor and process until smooth.

This recipe makes a more traditional pesto that is delectable (pictured on the right above).

Pesto
From Mollie Katzen, Moosewood Cookbook
makes 1 c.

3 c. (packed) fresh basil leaves
3 to 4 large cloves garlic
1/3 c. pine nuts or chopped walnuts, lightly toasted
1/3 c. olive oil
1/3 c. parmesan
about 1/4-1/3 tsp. salt

Place all ingredients in a blender or food processor and process until smooth.

Finally, this tomato sauce freezes well and tastes like summer.

Summer Tomato Sauce
From Anna Thomas, The New Vegetarian Epicure
makes 2.5 to 3 c. (I got quite a bit more than this)

3 lbs. ripe tomatoes (at least a quart when chopped)
1 Tbsp. fruity green olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp. finely chopped fresh basil
salt and pepper to taste (I use about 1/2 tsp. salt per batch)

Scald the tomatoes in boiling water for about 45 seconds and slip off their skins. Trim the stems and process briefly to a somewhat rough texture in a blender or food processor.

Heat the olive oil in a saucepan and add the garlic. Stir it for about a minute, then pour in the tomatoes. Add the basil, salt, and pepper, and cook the sauce on a medium flame for about half an hour, or a little longer if the tomatoes were very juicy, until reduced by about a third.

Bon appetit!

Despite the fact that I seem to be posting a good deal less frequently than I would like, I hasten to assure you that I am still knitting. My productivity has slowed, to be sure, but then everything in the land of knit blogging seems to have slowed down of late. Though I’m not one for navel gazing (except that this week, the 27th of my pregnancy, my navel is starting the process of turning itself inside out, which does indeed prompt some curious gazing, plus a good bit of poking), I do wonder why it seems that I’m not the only one whose knitting productivity has slowed.

At any rate, I am managing to crank out the baby knits, which has the enjoyable advantage of allowing me to use up odd skeins of things from my stash. I finished the second Carseat Blanket a few weeks ago but had yet to post about it because I wanted to do a photoshoot that involved a real baby, possibly in an actual carseat. When I went to babysit for my friend Rebecca this week, however, I forgot my camera and missed my opportunity. Thus, this picture is the best I’ve managed so far:

It would be a lot more interesting with a baby in it, no?

Unlike the first Carseat Blanket, which is done in a bulky alpaca/merino blend, I knit this with Nature’s Palette Fingering by Hand Jive Knits, a sock-weight 100 percent wool yarn. I double-stranded walnut and chocolate, using two skeins of each color, and I threw in some leftover mallard to make one row in the border. I’m very pleased with the outcome, which strikes me as sort of antique-y and understated, as well as gender-neutral. I’m hoping to write up the pattern soon and to offer it for sale on Ravelry. I plan to include directions for both weights of yarn.

I’ve also been cranking out a little stripey baby cardigan using New England Shetland from Harrisville Designs in white and poppy. I picked up these two skeins at half-price in the spring, and I think I’ll have just enough to do a cardigan to fit a six-month-old baby. It will probably have a deep band of white at the bottom to match the orange at the top, plus white button bands and collar. If there’s enough yarn, I’d like to do a pocket, too. But since I only have the two skeins, it will be a bit of an adventure trying to figure out such details as when to stop knitting the body and start the sleeves, as well as how much yarn I’ll have to save out for the button bands.

Oh, and if you haven’t already heard, Mel of Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans will be participating again this year in the Breast Cancer 3-Day walk, which will entail her traveling to Washington, D.C., with her husband, Tad, and then walking sixty miles in three days to raise money for breast cancer research. You can read about her personal reasons for participating in the walk here. Anyone who donates to sponsor her walk gets a shot at some of the fabulous prizes in her contest, which you can see here and here, with more to come. I hope you’ll join me in supporting Mel and this important cause.

Leona would like you to know that she has a new hat.

I keep telling her that the hat is for the baby, but she counters with, "Only if the baby is a girl. If it’s a boy, I get to keep it."

I have to admit, she does look awfully fetching in it.

Pattern: My own (made up as I went along)

Size: Newborn-ish

Yarn: Froelich Wolle Special Blauband (80 percent wool, 20 percent nylon; 210 m per 50 g), 2021 (off-white); Interlacements Tiny Toes (100 percent superwash merino; 185 yds per 50 g), reds plus

Yardage: 1 skein Froelich Wolle; about half a skein of Tiny Toes

Source: Yarn swap with my friend Alison, who got it from a thrift shop; Interlacements

Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) bamboo double-points

Gauge: About 6.5 stitches and 8 rows = 1"

Notes: This hat was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects that nonetheless had a long gestation. I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate the Swedish Weave technique into projects for quite some time, but while I have produced a swatch and an inch and a half of an elaborate adult hat (temporarily abandoned), this is the first actual project I have knit that uses the stitch.

I encountered Swedish Weave in one of the first two Barbara Walker treasuries (can’t recall which one). It is actually not even a stitch so much as it’s a technique, and even calling it a technique is a bit of a stretch, since it is dead simple. To work Swedish Weave, you knit your background color in stockinette stitch, and you float your contrast color alternately in front of and behind the knit stitch, creating a dashed line across the front of the knit fabric (and across the back, too, for that matter). If you follow the same front-and-back sequence on every row, you can line the floats up in columns, but Walker suggests that you stagger them, which is what I’ve done here in sets of three rows.

My goal for this hat was to show off the pretty colors of my Interlacements yarn on a plain white backdrop, and I feel that I’ve succeeded: Swedish Weave is a great technique for making it look like you’ve done something complicated with a handpainted yarn when in fact all that you’ve done is flicked it back and forth in front of your working needle as you went around.

I achieved the somewhat puffy shape of the hat by knitting a garter-stitch band, increasing by about 10 percent in the first row above the band, increasing again a few rows later, and increasing a third time, at which point I thought I had enough stitches on the needles. Then I knit straight up for a while until I started to run out of white yarn, finally decreasing on the same stitch every other row until I had just a few stitches left to pull into the inside. To tell the truth, I put all those increases in because I was afraid the hat would be too small without them. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the outcome would be a lovely onion-shaped hat with a vaguely Continental air about it.

I figure that even if the baby is a girl, she’ll only be able to wear this hat for a single winter, and then I will return it to Leona, who really deserves something rakish after all her years of faithful, bald service.

Where has August gone? Seriously, I have not even had time to update the Thelma’s Knitting sidebar yet, and the month is half over. Yikes.

I will remedy that, and soon. I have a finished object to write about this weekend.

Meanwhile, some of you may be interested to know that I’m heeding your call for a Carseat Blanket pattern. Version 2.0 is well underway, and it is awfully pretty, if I do say so myself.

Also, have you seen Sheldon’s new togs over at Knit Picks? Brooke Higgins designed a fabulous set of "career outfits" for him so that he can play dress-up as a police officer, a cowboy, a beach bum, a superhero, or a pirate. All the patterns can be purchased in a kit from Knit Picks. Brooke has some great pictures over at her blog, DrunkenMonkeyKnits.

I know that these outfits must have taken Brooke ages to design and write up for Knit Picks, because I designed some outfits of my own for him — but they won’t be released until late September or early October, so that’s all I’m going to say for now.