Ruthless Knitting

People seem to love to knit blankets for babies. I myself have knit one baby blanket, and I more or less enjoyed the process. But it is a long process, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking on another baby blanket any time soon, especially as a baby shower gift.

Perhaps others agree with me that the baby blanket is a rather large commitment for a gift, since knitters always seem to be looking for the next big thing in baby shower gifts.

I may have found it. I present to you the Carseat Blanket.

The idea for the Carseat Blanket came to me when my friend Rebecca was kind enough to tote her newborn infant to my house along with gobs of maternity clothes that she no longer needed and had carefully selected to suit my personal taste. (Thanks, Rebecca!) While her daughter Madelyn was lounging on the floor in her carseat –

(perhaps you wish to see a picture of Madelyn wearing the dress I knit for her? yes?) 

– while this specimen of chubby baby cuteness was lounging in her carseat on the floor, I noticed how very small the infant carseat is, and I thought, "Man, you don’t really need much of a blanket to cover up such a little baby!" Indeed, the bigger the blanket is, the more you have to fold it and tuck it out of the way so it doesn’t drag on the floor while you carry that stupid behemoth carseat around.

What the parents of a newborn really need, I decided, is an itty-bitty blanket. A blanket just big enough, say, for Leona. A blanket about two feet square. Voila!

The Carseat Blanket is the perfect project for the overworked knitting enthusiast and/or slightly weary pregnant knitter, since it can be knocked out in four or five hours of knitting time, tops, on biggish needles. It is also a good project for the lazy knitter, since you can cast on as many stitches as it seems might be appropriate, knit the middle part, and then just keep cranking out that edging until you run out of yarn. If you cast on too few stitches, so what? Your edging will just be wider and therefore cuter. Too many stitches? You’ll have a narrower edging, but it won’t matter, because rose stitch doesn’t require a border to lay flat in any event.

Can you tell that I’m inordinately pleased with myself?

Pattern: My own.

Size: 22.5 x 23.5 inches

Yarn: Aslan Trends Guanaco (60 percent alpaca, 40 percent merino wool; 145 yds per 100 g skein) in blue jeans and papaya

Source: Loopy Yarns, Chicago, IL

Needles: US 11 (8.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: About 11 stitches over 4" in both rose and garter stitch

Notes: Rose stitch is one of my very favorite stitches. It’s much simpler than it looks: on the front side, you knit one into the stitch below, then purl one, and repeat these two actions all the way across. On the back side, you knit all the stitches. Then on the next right-side row, you offset by one stitch. If you want striped rose stitch, you change colors every other row. Through some bit of knitting alchemy, it ends up looking like this. Easy peasy, and it spreads like all get-out. The body of this blanket only has 40 stitches across (for about 18 inches of the width) and is about 90 rows tall, so it didn’t take much longer to knit than a little 40-stitch swatch would have.

On a negative note, I feel obliged to say that I only sort of liked the Guanaco yarn that I used for this project. I really enjoyed the colors (which David picked out), but the texture is a little problematic. According to the Ravelry page for the yarn, it is billed as "snuggly bulky soft Alpaca wool." "Just touch it and you will love it forever," the company urges, since it is "specially designed for softness and comfort."

I hate to rain on Aslan Trends’ parade, but if you want alpaca/merino yarn to be soft, you have to remove the guard hairs from the alpaca. Otherwise, you will have a very soft base yarn that is bristling with, well, bristles. It’s acceptable for an outer layer, but I wouldn’t want it against my skin, and I sure as heck wouldn’t put it directly on a baby’s skin. Maybe I just got a bad batch?

At any rate, this was such a simple and fun project that I’m thinking of making another in a solid color. I have two skeins of red cotton yarn that need a purpose. Anyone interested in the pattern for this? I could probably refine it in the next go-round and write it up for public consumption without too much difficulty.

Glass art, as I mentioned earlier this year, is my father’s hobby. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a website yet, but I will show you his most recent bowl (without permission — sorry Dad!) so you can be wowed by his skills. He made this with leftovers, folks. This is a scrap bowl.

As you can imagine, I would be remiss as a daughter if I didn’t take advantage of his skills to make something out of glass pretty much whenever I go to visit. (Also, he spent much of his free time for a year making me a totally amazing and perfect lamp for my kitchen. The scrap bowl above is made of scraps from one of the failed lamps.) So while I was out in Oregon in June, I made this drop-ring vase:

This is a fused glass project, meaning that it was melted into this shape in a kiln. The process involved layering three rectangles of glass — clear on the bottom, then light gray, then blue — and using long, skinny rods of glass called "stringer" on the top to make a grid pattern. I superglued the stringer onto the blue glass; superglue burns off in the kiln. Between the bottom clear layer and the gray layer, I placed white and mint green stringer in an abstract pattern and then, on the spur of the moment, sprinkled on some little pieces of red stringer that I had left over from the top.

With that done, I stacked my pile of glass rectangles inside the kiln on top of a clay form that my father had made with a hole in the middle of it. I programmed the kiln according to his instructions, pressed "start," and went inside to have lunch.

By dinnertime, the glass had heated up enough that it had started to melt. Since it was stacked on top of something with a hole in the middle of it, it melted down through the hole toward the bottom of the kiln. (This is the "drop" in any "drop-ring vase.") At this stage, we opened the kiln door pretty regularly to have a look at the glass’s progress. Once the dropping glass reached the floor of the kiln and began to pool, we let it form a nice foot and then kept the door open long enough to rapidly cool the kiln down to a temperature below the melting point. Then we closed the door and let the glass "anneal" (which has something to do with all the molecules lining up into their new configuration — I’m a bit fuzzy on this) and cool down overnight. By the morning, it was ready for inspection.

You can see in this last picture and the one above how the stringer that dropped through the hole elongated and made pretty vertical lines on the inside of the vase. On the outside, the gray glass turned silvery in the foot, and the red bits of stringer that I threw in on a whim made an interesting, confetti-like pattern. The stringer that I used on the underside was not as successful, as the color contrast wasn’t really sufficient for it to show up much.

Once the vase had cooled down, there was a lot of "cold working" to do, which basically entails endless grinding and polishing of the glass edge so that it looks shiny and smooth, as if it had been born that way. I learned that I have very little patience for cold working.

People tend to talk about knitting as if it is complicated and fraught with the potential for failure. While it is true that there are plenty of things one can get wrong while knitting, particularly when knitting a garment, it is also usually the case that, in the face of such a failure, one can rip it all out and start over without losing anything but one’s time. Fused glass is not nearly so forgiving a medium. I cannot tell you how many times my dad has spent hours and hours cutting glass and otherwise sweating over a project, only to have it bubble disastrously or crack or just somehow go to hell in the kiln. Glass is a harsh mistress. But it also, like knitting, has the potential to reward your careful planning with results that are lovely in ways that realize your mind’s eye vision at the same time that they surprise you completely.

What I’m trying to say is that I suspect my dad likes working with glass for many of the same reasons that I like working with yarn. Huh. Go figure.

So, while this piece looks a little more like something Spiderman would use to decorate his home than I had intended it to, I am nonetheless rather taken with it. Thanks, Dad, for letting me dabble in your craft.

Pattern: Just your basic toe-up sock
Size: Women’s medium/large
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock Multi (80 percent superwash wool, 20 percent nylon; 215 yds per 2 oz skein)
Yardage: About 1.25 skeins
Source: Iris Fine Yarns 
Needles: US 0 (2.0 mm) double-pointed metal needles
Gauge: No idea — I forgot to check.
Notes: By the skin of my teeth, I managed to finish my mom’s socks before our vacation ended on Saturday morning, and she agreed to model them for your viewing pleasure.

These were pretty straightforward socks. They have what I think Charlotte Schurch calls an "easy toe" in her book Sensational Knitted Socks: I began with a simple little stockinette rectangle 18 stitches wide by 8 rows long, then picked up stitches along the three sides and increased at each corner on every other row until I had 18 stitches on each needle. After that, it was just round and round to the heel.

Because I reached the heel of the first sock on the day I was taking Lucy Neatby’s sock class, I used her directions to create a simple garter-stitch short-row heel. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this heel is that it uses more than 50 percent of the stitches on the sock, which Lucy says creates a more comfortable heel. For the second sock, which I didn’t knit for a few months after the first was completed, I didn’t have her directions with me, and I’m not entirely confident that I used the same method of wrapping. Still, the two socks seem passably similar. Mom seems to like them, so I call the project a success!

Pattern: Harry by Martin Storey from Jaeger Handknits JB29
Size: 6-9 mo. (20" chest)
Yarn: Knit Picks Telemark (100 percent Peruvian highland wool; 103 yds per 50 g ball) in Lichen, Colonial Blue, Delft Heather, Squirrel Heather, Icicle, and Deep Navy; Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash DK, undyed
Yardage: Unknown quantity of leftovers
Sources: Knit Picks; Catnip Yarns 
Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm) and 4 (3.5 mm) straight needles
Gauge: About 25 stitches and 32 rows  = 4" in stockinette stitch
Notes: This little sweater is so satisfyingly cute that it makes up for the lengthy finishing stage, which involved sewing up all the pieces, knitting up the button bands and seaming them on, knitting on the collar, and weaving in far more ends than I could possibly have produced in the process of knitting the sweater.

I decided to knit Harry in the first place because I had a bunch of leftover Telemark yarn in search of a project. Unfortunately, I didn’t know exactly how much I had of anything, so I had to make some educated guesses about how many stripes I could manage of each color, and I did run out of navy blue at the end — as I ran out of just about every color. This made the decision about what color to make the collar quite simple: the collar had to be gray, because that was the only color I had left in sufficient quantity. And then I ran out of gray, so the collar is a bit on the short side. I decided to finish it off in navy to help make it match the rest of the sweater. Necessity is the mother of invention.

While looking through one of my grandma’s photo albums yesterday, I saw a picture of a sweater she made me for Christmas when I was about ten. I had forgotten all about this sweater, and I was surprised to find that it uses the exact same pattern as the Harry sweater (horizontal stripes with a few rows of "teeth" at each transition) and pretty much the same colors (several shades of blue with white on top). How delightful!

I’m visiting my parents this week, so I’m trying to get my mother’s second sock done while I’m here. Next up will probably be a sweater from the Woobu yarn that I showed in my last post. I knit a swatch that I’m very happy with; I have to see what the intended recipient thinks. The Woobu knits up like a dream, and it has a really impressive shine that somehow manages not to be garish. I’m looking forward to working with it.

My friend Rebecca had her new baby, Madelyn, yesterday. She is perfect and adorable. The dress will hardly do her justice.

Pattern: My own
Size: 3-6 mo. (16" chest, meant to fit snugly)
Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Skinny Dyed Cotton (100 percent cotton; 150 yds per 65 g skein) in mallard and maize
Yardage: 140 yds mallard, approx 100 yds maize
Source: Jimmy Beans Wool
Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) circular needles
Gauge: 5.5 sts and 8 rows = 4" in stockinette stitch
Notes: Since Maddy is a summer baby, I designed this with the image in my mind of her hanging out on a pretty summer’s day by the inflatable pool, watching while her big sister splashes around in the water. I think it turned out pretty cute, given that I pretty much made it up as I went along.

I cast on provisionally for this dress and ended up knitting in both directions, first upward until I had finished the tube for the top, then downward for the skirt, and then upward again to make the straps. This method allowed me to (a) cast on an almost random number of stitches and knit for a while before deciding how many I needed to decrease for the top and (b) use up as much yarn as possible for the skirt part without running out.

I like the Skinny Dyed cotton okay — the colors, in particular, are just lovely — but it’s sort of a strange yarn. It seems to be made up of about a million teensy strands of cotton plied together with very little twist, and this means that you have to be careful to catch them all on every stitch. If you miss even one strand, your fabric will show it. Nonetheless, with pointy needles and in stockinette, this was not a big deal. I’d use it again for a baby garment.

Onward to the next baby knit! I have a little sweater in the works to use up leftovers. Stay tuned.

Pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmerman
Size: 6-9 mo?
Yarn: Craftspun Bluefaced Leicester Aran (100 percent wool); Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash DK (100 percent superwash merino wool)
Yardage: 300-350 yds
Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI; Catnip Yarns 
Needles: US 6 (4.0 mm) 24" circular needles
Gauge: 5.5 sts = 1" in garter stitch
Notes: I have been working a LOT lately, and I had to work last weekend, too, but I also needed to relax, and knitting this little jacket was, for whatever reason, the only thing I wanted to do when I had some time to take a break. Consequently, it knit up very quickly, and the process was fun. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this pattern, the important thing to know is that the whole sweater is knit in one piece, then folded up at the end and seamed across the top of the arms. Pre-folding, the knit piece of fabric looks truly bizarre, like a manta ray or something. As I followed the pattern directions, I was very interested in trying to work out what exactly I was knitting and how the jacket was going to take shape. Once I figured out where the arms were, it wasn’t too hard to understand the construction, though I still can’t quite imagine coming up with the pattern myself. Very clever, that Elizabeth Zimmerman.

I used the version of this pattern that appears in Zimmerman’s Knitting Workshop. The only trouble I had with it was figuring out how much yarn I would need: the pattern calls for 3 oz. of Shetland wool, which helped me not at all. (What weight is Shetland wool? Are we talking DK/sport, like Jamieson’s Shetland?) Luckily, I knew that the pattern was quite forgiving, so I decided to just dive in. I had 100 g (3.5 oz) of aran-weight yarn, which I figured might be on the heavy side, but I did get something approaching gauge with it, so off I went. It quickly became clear that 187 yds was not going to cut it, so I went in search of other yarns to use and came up with this bright blue yarn that I dyed last year. (I consider blue to be a gender-neutral color, by the way.) When I ran out of that, I used some undyed yarn of the same weight, which, thankfully, matched the undyed yarn that I started out with. It was all a bit of an adventure.

Some people churn out Baby Surprise Jacket after Baby Surprise Jacket. I can certainly see the appeal for using up leftovers, and it was the perfect pattern for me in the midst of a stressful time with work. In general, though, I don’t like to knit things more than once, and that much garter stitch would put me to sleep in normal conditions. It will be interesting to see if and when I decide to make another.

Next up, I’ve been working on a little cotton dress for my friend’s baby, who is due next week.

I’m actually knitting it from both ends at once, since my yarn supply is limited, and I want to make sure that I don’t run out. Progress has been fairly swift, so I’m hoping to have another little baby thing to show off early next week. The near-instant satisfaction of baby knitting is right up my alley these days.