Ruthless Knitting

Thank you for your many compliments on the Florence progress pictures! I ought to have finished it by now, but instead I started something altogether different.

For lack of a better name, I’m calling it my “wine-dark sea” pullover. Because of the dark blue and the wine-y brown. And because of the nautical stripes. Please humor me.

I feel some remorse about beginning a new project when I was so close to finishing Florence, but I have a number of perfectly good excuses. First, David left town for a few nights, which always rather unmoors me. I wander aimlessly about the house, eat too many cookies, watch too many bad movies, and usually start a new knitting project. It seems I can’t help myself. (Indeed, this project was born as a swatch I knit the last time David left town.)

Second, I’m going to get the new Harry Potter book soon, and I wanted a project I could knit mindlessly while reading. I’m only an inch or so away from dividing this for the sleeves, at which point I can sail along through the rest with little thought, eyes focused on the gigantic book open in my lap.

While excuses #1 and #2 are valid as far as they go, excuse #3 is perhaps the most honest: I was sick of Florence. I had spent too many days looking at pink. Too many days knitting with dental-floss-like yarn. I need to work on something different for a while — something that offers a more pleasurable tactile experience. This yarn is 100% tussah silk. It’s fitting the bill nicely.

Sooner or later, I will most likely grow tired of knitting around in circles, return to port, and take up again with my lass Florence. For now, though, I’m quite happy to be becalmed with my stripey friend here.

On Friday, I finished the back of Florence.

I finished sleeve number 1 this morning, and it looks about right, though it’s so stiff it stands straight out from my arm in a rather silly fashion. I’m sure it will be fine once I block it. On to sleeve number 2!

I have yet to wrap up my repairs on the turtle sweater, but I did create a chart for the intarsia turtle and post it on the Design page (see sidebar on the right), should anyone wish to replicate it.

Thanks for the ideas and questions about the turtle sweater. My explanation perhaps lacked clarity, but no matter, because I tried something and it seems to have worked.

Here is Leona, modeling the new and improved (but not yet put back together) version of the sweater:

What I did, after picking apart the pieces (and inadvertently making a few additional holes along the way, whoops!), was rip back about 12 rows of the back and put the live stitches back on the needle. I marked which stitches were for the shoulders. Then I counted how many stitches I had left for the back neck and compared this number to the number of stitches I had for the back of the hood to determine that I needed to increase 20 stitches if I wanted the back neck to have as many stitches as the hood at the point where they were to be joined. I increased 10 of these stitches in the first row, knit 5 rows plain, increased 10 more on the sixth row, and knit plain until the back was as tall as the front again. Finally, I separately grafted each shoulder to its mate and the back neck to the bottom of the hood.

Here’s what the back neck looks like now. I’m sure the lumpiness will mostly block out.

Leona is worried that the neck opening is “a little big” now, but I told her, “That’s Gwendolyn’s mom’s problem, honey, not ours.” As far as I’m concerned, I just have to seam the thing back together, tidy up some of those holes, and we’ll be in business. Of course, since I’ve solved the problem, I’ve lost all interest in finishing the repair. I take comfort in the fact that it won’t be sweater weather here for a while yet.

In further news of things that are pink, I’ve been making steady progress with the back of Florence.

136 rows down, 70-odd rows to go. I’ve had so much work to do lately that the steady diet of plain stockinette has been rather soothing. I have high hopes of finishing the back soon, and then I’m sure the rest will go quickly. We may just see Florence finished before July is out. And when Florence does debut, I’m going to have a contest. Get your tape measures ready!

Once upon a time, I knit a sweater with a turtle on it for little baby Gwendolyn.

I used Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, and I made up the intarsia pattern myself. When I finished it, I was a little concerned that the head opening was too small, but given that Gwen wasn’t exactly born yet, and given that I didn’t expect the sweater to fit her until she was about nine months old, I didn’t have any way to figure it out for sure. So I had Leona try it on.

As you can see, it fit Leona perfectly well, and Leona has a biggish head. “Good enough,” I thought.

Seven months later, Gwendolyn is getting bigger all the time, and she’s just about big enough for the sweater. But it doesn’t fit her, because her head is not as squishy as Leona’s. Indeed, the process of being forced to try on the sweater made her quite grumpy, and she didn’t cheer up until her mother had removed the offending garment. Obviously, something must be done.

Gwendolyn’s mom would like me to try to fix the sweater, and I am only too happy to comply, in part because it gives me an opportunity to fix a few things about it that I never liked anyway. Also, it will provide a welcome distraction from my glacial progress on the back of Florence (formerly the Habu top), which looks like this:

Why have I managed to finish so very little of Florence? Well, there is the regular business of life: I have had to attend to work, house cleaning, bike riding, jogging, yoga, grocery shopping, making dinner, lunch with Gwendolyn’s mom, and so on.

Also, I’ve been trying to work up the Buster pattern so I can submit it to the Jimmy Beans Wool contest. I thought the hard work would be over when I got the charting done, but, uh, no. It’s been pretty painful. And just when I thought I was getting somewhere (around Wednesday), I realized that I had to more or less start over. So the Buster pattern and I are not on good terms right now.

Then, yesterday, after Yarn Harlot wrote about Mystery Stole 3, I totally got sucked in to the idea of making a mystery stole. I was particularly excited about using up a skein of laceweight yarn that I bought last winter with no particular project in mind. So I signed up, only to learn that I needed a lot more laceweight yarn than I actually had. I decided to just cast on for the swatch for the project, figuring I’d sort out some kind of plan as I went along. Luckily, by the time I finished the swatch, I had come to my senses: I don’t have the yarn for a stole right now. I don’t want to make a stole right now. And I have lots of other things I would rather do. I resigned from the Mystery Stole group this morning.

(Let me add that this outcome is one of many reasons that I love to swatch. When I’m really jonesing to start something new, nine times out of ten all I have to do is knit a swatch for the new project in order to realize it will in fact be no more exciting than my current project. Then I wash the swatch, put it away, and get back to whatever I was supposed to be doing.)

Which was what, again? Oh yes, Florence. Well, instead of doing that, I took apart the baby sweater. Now it looks like this:

It is time to formulate a plan. Here is what I’ve been thinking:

(1) One thing I didn’t like about the sweater to begin with is how thick the seams are. They are probably an okay thickness for an adult garment, but they don’t work for a baby sweater. The thick seams on the sides and for the armholes were unavoidable (because I couldn’t have knit the turtle in the round), though I can perhaps improve them a bit by doing the seaming with a lighter-weight yarn. But there was no reason to seam the shoulders or hood, so this time, I’d like to graft them. This should have the bonus effect of making them stretchier, which should help the sweater fit better over Gwendolyn’s noggin.

(2) I seem to remember that the back of the hood has more stitches than the back of the neck was designed to have. I tried to solve this problem by increasing in the last few rows of the back of the sweater so that I had a one-to-one ratio of hood stitches to back neck stitches. This is why the back of the neck looks kind of wavy in the picture below.

I don’t think that increasing those stitches was a bad idea, but it didn’t help much, because then I bound them all off and ended up with an inflexible back neck anyway. I’d like to rip out a few inches of the back and reknit it so that it gradually increases in width to accommodate the hood stitches.

That brings me to (3). If I make the back bigger but leave the shoulders the same size, and if I graft the hood on, and if I graft the shoulders, do you think that will give the head opening enough ease and flexibility? Or do I need to do all of those things and make the shoulders narrower, leaving more head space? If I do that, I’ll have to rip out the whole hood, because the hood is knit onto the front, and I can’t adjust the shoulder size on the front without also ripping out the hood. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Lately, I haven’t had much to say about my knitting. I’ve been doing a lot of what I think of as Duty Knitting — working on things I have to finish so I can move on to other things. I got myself into this mess by knitting one sock for my mother that doesn’t fit her. This necessitated the knitting of another sock that will fit her. Then I volunteered to knit a test sock for Nicole. And to finish Grandma’s socks — which were, at least, only a 1/2 sock commitment. Before I knew it, I had three socks that needed mates. Meanwhile, I knit the front of a garment, creating the need for me to knit the (almost entirely plain) back. So my knitting queue looks something like this: second Oriel sock, back of Habu top, second 9 to 5 sock, second Red Herring sock. All of these projects are beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed creating the first half of all of them. But I am enough of a process knitter that second halves are not as much fun for me, while I am enough of a product knitter (also known as a “duty-bound knitter”) that I can’t imagine leaving those second halves unmade. And given how busy I have been with work, for which I have been putting in punishing hours to catch up, the knitting is proceeding very slowly these days. Thus, I see my knitting life mapped out for me for the next several weeks, and lo, it is dull.

So. Let’s see what Florence is up to, shall we?

We last left Florence in May 1927, when Slim was nowhere to be found and Bob had popped in for a visit. The diary picks up again a year later.

April 4, 1928. We started to clean house.

April 8 Easter Sunday. Louises all here. Snowed + blowed. Was not very nice. Louise, Little Billie and I were weighed on April 7 1928. I weighed 90 lbs Bill 42 and Louise 141.

I was to quit at the store on April 7 but did not quit that week.

Hmm. Things were a bit gloomy in the land of Florence, what with the bad Easter weather and her plan/desire to quit her job. Perhaps weighing 90 pounds was some consolation. (Louise, by the way, was her sister, and Little Billie her nephew.)

The next diary entries are inexplicably dated from the previous month:

March 19, 1928. Went to Buffalo. Left New Castle at 10:51 and arrived at Buffalo at 4:10. Bob met me. We went to shows and had a very nice time. We left Saturday Mar. 24 for Canada and came back from Toronto on Sunday Mar 25. Mother called me at evening that Grandpa I. died Sunday Mar 24 at 10:40 A.M. Bob and Mr. Wills went to Albany and Cornell N.Y. Monday A.M. at 4 o’clock to see about that job they were bidding on. They came home that night about 12 o’clock. I came home Tuesday. Left at 4 something and got into New Castle about 9:30. Harry and Frances met me in the Ford. Grandpa was buried on Wednesday Mar 28 at 2 P.M. Rev Binginer(?) preached the services.

April 3, 1928. Slim left that morning on the run and did not come back that night. He was not back yet Easter Sunday April 8. Wednesday April 4 Chas Bentfield was in Pittsburgh. Said he saw Slim in Ambridge. Had a letter from Bob. Said they got the job April 3 $71,000.00 job.

I gather from this rather mixed set of entries that Bob was still in contention, especially given Slim’s ongoing absences. The $71,000 job (that’s 1928 dollars, people) sounds like good news, though it might have kept him in New York unable to visit for a while. And obviously, the death of Florence’s grandfather was bad news.

The next entry is long and quite interesting:

April 11, 1928. Slim came home on the 2:30 train in the A.M. He went to bed could not sleep and woke mother up and talked with her. He seemed to be very delirious but worked the next day April 12, 1928. He was in bad shape on the train. Imagined he saw and heard things. That night I stayed home from Grandma’s and stayed up with him all night. He did not sleep a wink + neither did I. He was delirious all night. We had Dr. for him about 8:30. He said he would be alright in a few days. He improved the next day. The High School play was Friday evening April 13 1928. I stayed home with Slim + stayed up that night with him. He was seeing things all night and was very bad. Then that morning he went in on the 6:40 train and met Rowland + he took him to St. Francis Hospital Saturday afternoon April 14, 1928. I called up hospital Sat. + Sunday + he was getting along O.K. Then Monday morning I went to Pittsburgh. Had a talk with Rowland and then I called Aunt Lottie + her + I went out to hospital to see Slim. They did not want to let us in but after I talked awhile they let me go up to see him. He was up + around looked real good. Said he felt alright. Then when we came down we went to Jinko Arcade to see his Dr. Dr Hemminger + he said he did not know when he could come out. He would see him on Tuesday morning and then let me know. I went home with Aunt Lottie and stayed all night. Expect to stay until Slim gets out of hospital.

Thursday Slim got out of hospital.

Did you follow all that? The short version: Slim got sick, Florence nursed him, Slim got better. The longer version is more interesting: Slim became delirious and woke up Florence’s mother in the middle of the night to talk to her (aside: Was Slim sleeping at Florence’s house? Rather unexpected and unsuitable, don’t you think?). He went to work hallucinating, possibly endangering the lives of passengers. Florence stayed up with him all night the next two nights straight while he hallucinated and was “very bad.” They sent him to the hospital in Pittsburgh, where Florence remained by Slim’s side (to the extent possible) for the next four days.

Folks, I think Bob is out of the running. Florence’s devotion to Slim is extreme, and since he apparently made it through his health crisis, I suspect he clinched his place as Suitor Number 1.

Meanwhile, I turned a corner in my knitting. Well, not literally. But David and I took a 54-mile bike ride last weekend, which gave me plenty of time to think about my frustration with the Duty Knitting. I started counting up all of the sweaters that I have mentally designed but not yet knit. I currently have the yarn to make four separate designs, and I have designed and swatched two more but not bought the yarn for them yet. That’s quite a queue, people! No wonder the Duty Knitting is getting me down.

But while I was thinking about my project list, it occurred to me that six sweaters = “the Ruthless Knitting Fall/Winter 2007 Collection,” currently in its planning stages but coming to a website near you (this website, that is) in the coming months. For some reason, thinking about these six sweaters as my collection-to-be makes me feel enormously better. I will devote this fall and winter to creating them all, and it will be fun. I just have a few other projects to wrap up first, as well as some design decisions to figure out via swatching. (Just to be clear — it is a “collection” in my own mind only. I don’t intend to write up all of these patterns, nor do I intend to sell them. The label is not to be taken seriously.) The Duty Knitting no longer seems like such a burden.

Meanwhile, Florence also had a decision to make. Slim or Bob? As much fun as her diary is to read and contemplate, however, it is not a novel, and Florence did not weave in all the ends of her story for us. These are her last two entries:

May 16, 1928. Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers.

Saturday May 18, 1927. Street car hit Slim’s car at Conway.

That last entry is a doozy, isn’t it? When I first read it, I thought, “Slim’s been wounded! Or killed! And this is the last entry, so we’ll never know what happened to him!” But then I re-read the date: 1927. Slim’s car was hit by another car before any of the events of this post. In fact, it seems that his car was hit right around the time that Bob reappeared on the scene. Apparently, Slim wasn’t hurt. He just has bad luck with cars; you’ll recall that he had to return to Pittsburgh at an earlier point because his car had “burned.”

As for “Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers,” I’m not sure what that means. As best I can figure, one either opens up a nightclub as a performer, or one opens up a store as an employee. There’s no other internal evidence to help us determine whether Florence and her sister were a wild pair of performing flappers or tame shopgirls.

And that’s it. No closure.

But I did a little digging. First, I did some literal digging: right after I finished reading the diary for the first time, I realized that the little sewing table that had containted the diary also contained an address book that I had thrown away, and that it might also have been Florence’s. So I recovered it from the trash and flipped through it. Nothing of interest appeared among the addresses and phone numbers, and I was about to write it off as unhelpful when I saw a note on one of the last pages. It read: “Slim’s Social Security,” followed by a number.

Reader, she married Slim. Why else would she have jotted down his social security number? Only wives do that.

But I wanted more evidence, so I kept looking. The diary has Florence’s (rather unusual) last name in it, and I used it to do a bit of Internet geneaology research. Via an entry about one of her grandparents from a 1908 book, I learned that Florence was the son of a barber and that she had an older sister named Louise, as well as a twin sister named Frances. Using a list of her grandfather’s descendants, I confirmed that Florence married Slim, while her sister Frances married a man named Harry. (That must be the “Harry and Frances” who met Florence in the Ford.)

Still, I wanted more information. And I wanted to return the diary to Florence’s family, now that I had figured out who they were. So I sent an e-mail to a man in Germany whose e-mail address I found on a genealogy website. He contacted Florence’s second cousin, who e-mailed me with her physical address and a note about how delighted she would be to receive the diary. (The whole series of e-mails took about 24 hours. Isn’t the Internet great?)

The second cousin was able to tell me that Florence and Frances were born in 1906. Florence married her sweetheart, Slim, and in 1965 they lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After Slim died, Florence remarried twice. Using the information about her latter two husbands, I found an obituary online for Florence’s second husband that mentions that Florence died in 1998. She lived to be 92 years old.

And so the adventures of Florence come to an end. In honor of the fun we’ve had together, and the fact that I’m once again at peace with my knitting, I’ve decided to name the Habu top after Florence and to offer the pattern (assuming it comes out well) for free here on the site. I just have to finish knitting it first. Stay tuned.

I am so glad that you are enjoying the adventures of Florence. Gryphon’s comment prompts me to reassure you: Have no fear. You’ll find out who she married before this is over.

But not today.

You’ll recall that we last left Florence raving about how much she enjoys the company of “Slim,” a.k.a. Bill Booth, her card-playing suitor from Pittsburgh. Bob, her earlier beau, had mysteriously disappeared from the scene. This was around January 1927. Now we are on to March:

March 19, 1927. Slim went to Pittsburgh Saturday evening. The first time he went in town over the weekend since I have been going with him. He said he had to see about his car, which was burned a few weeks ago. He came back but was not over until Wednesday evening. He went to Pitts on Tuesday eve. drove Molly West’s car up. Kino(?) went along. Monday evening he said he was home. Wed he was over + every other night until Mar 28 Monday when he bid another run in + got it. So he went in to Pitts Monday on the 6:45 P.M. He called me as soon as he got in to Pitts. + to his room.

Forced to be separated from Slim for the first time since they met, Florence begins tracking his movements rather closely. So far, his behavior seems reasonable. Since his car has been “burned” (vandals? lightning strike?), he must go to Pittsburgh to do something about it. But why didn’t he call on Monday when he was home?

While Florence waits to see what Slim will do next, I’ll give you a sock update: I finished the first Oriel sock for my mom. It’s pretty, and it fits mom, so all is well here, even though it accidentally went through the dryer on a full, hot-air cycle. Since the yarn is dark brown and black, I like to think of this as the first of my “Oreo Oriels.”

Now back to Florence:

I started to work at Robertson on March 21, 1927.

Mrs. Wilson died Mar 15, 1927.

March 29, 1927. John came down on the 12:45. He said he saw Slim was marked up for [the] 117 March 20, so I came down from Robertsons + waved to him when the train went through about 1:10 P.M. Look for him out some time Thursday Mar. 31.

Mar. 31, Slim came out on the 5:45 and we took him to Beaver Falls to get [the] 140 at 9:01. Only had a few minutes to get train. Was glad to see Slim Thursday evening. But our visit was short.

Isn’t that sweet? She’s a working girl now (is Robertson’s a shop?), but she still found time to run down to the station to wave at Slim as his train came through town and to ferry him from one station to another so they could spend some time together. I think Slim must have been a conductor. How else could she expect him to see her on the platform?

April 1, Mother went to [the] lodge. I sewed some + went to bed early. Louise’s birthday. Minnie still improving.

On April 23, Slim came down on the 12:45 + started to work on the New Enon run on Sunday morning April 24, 1927. On May 7, Sat eve., Slim did not come home. He was off all week did not come back until May 14, 1927. Tuesday May 12, Simms(?) broke his arm playing ball.

Uh-oh. Slim was tied up at work for three weeks, and yet he failed to come home when he was off for a whole week. This is not a good sign.

Friday evening May 26, 1826. Slim was bumped Sat May 28. Bob came down from New York stayed until Monday morning May 30.

The triumphant return of Bob! I don’t know what it means that Slim was “bumped,” but it would seem that Bob arrived at the right moment to take advantage of Florence’s dissatisfaction with the poker-playing lout. Well-timed, Bob!

We’ve also had a triumphant return here at Ruthless Knitting: the Habu project is back!

I am so glad that I decided to wash the swatch, because when it came out of the dryer it was both shorter and wider than I expected it to be, making up for the 10 stitches that I accidentally forgot to cast on. The thing about this Habu Cotton Gima is that it can be whatever size you want it to be. The swatch could easily be stretched to 23 inches wide and 7 inches tall, or 20 inches wide and 7.5 inches tall, or 18 inches wide and 8 inches tall — whatever you like! This is a bit maddening from a design perspective, but I’m trying to knit it to the size that the knitted fabric naturally will return to (and thus most wants to be). I unraveled the bound-off edge on the swatch, joined new yarn, and knit up most of the rest of the front. Just one side of the V-neck to go, and I’ll be on to the back.

I think the Habu project needs a name. Perhaps I should call it “Florence.”

So that’s where we are. Florence has to choose between one of two beaus, and I have finished part one of two different projects. Will she marry Bob or Bill? Will the Habu project work out, or will it crash and burn? Will I find the fortitude to knit the second Oriel sock?

Stay tuned.