Ruthless Knitting Archive

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.

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.

I just updated my "Thelma’s knitting" sidebar feature for the month of July 1973 only to find that thirty-five years ago in this month, my grandmother didn’t knit anything at all — not even a wee little sweater for my brother, Austin, who was to be born the following month.

Knowing this makes me feel better, because I haven’t been knitting all that much myself of late. I am working on a few projects here and there — the Neiman sweater is now four inches tall, though I suspect I might have to rip the whole thing out and start over, and I’m also knitting up the sample for a pattern I wrote for Gryphon last year — but I’m not finding as much time to knit as I was in the fall and winter, and my brain is more or less empty of creative knitting ideas. It seems that my knitting mind is hibernating.

This is no doubt because I am occupied with other thoughts. For one thing, I’ve been working a lot lately — sometimes too much, though that’s been better since mid-June — and work tends to crowd out everything else. For another, it’s finally summer, and I’ve been riding bikes a lot with David and generally finding time to be outside.

Most important, though, is that I’m nineteen weeks pregnant. While I’ve been lucky enough so far to find pregnancy to be mostly comfortable and to require very little of me except for extra snacking, it does tend to change my preferences for how I want to spend the very early morning and the hour before bed — the ninety minutes or so per day when I used to knit. Many nights lately, I’d rather lay on the couch and read a book. Some mornings, I haven’t quite felt up to drinking tea and concentrating my attention on the minute movements of my hands. Some knitting still gets done, but not very quickly, and perhaps not very interestingly from the point of view of readers of this blog.

I have never had a baby before, and I suppose that even if I had I wouldn’t be able to predict how my life were about to change. So I don’t really know what will happen with me and knitting (or blogging) in the future. I don’t expect that I will give them up entirely, but I’m unlikely to be able to finish objects very quickly or to write as many blog posts as I have this past year.

I am not too concerned, though. I think that for me, knitting is a long-term creative relationship rather than a short-term interest. That my grandmother, the knitter extraordinaire, produced no knitting whatsoever in July 1973 did not make her any less of a knitter. Why should I worry, then, if my knitting and blogging activities fall off for a while, even for several years?

Babies are only babies for a little while. So I will learn to be a mother, and when this baby is older, I will still know how to knit. Meanwhile, I will accept my slow progress as better than no progress at all.

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.

I’ve finished all the pieces of the Harry sweater and sewed up the raglan seams. Now I just have to finish the collar . . .

. . . and weave in some loose ends.

The ends are many in number, but I know from experience that the task is not too bad if I just take it one at a time.

We returned yesterday afternoon from a long weekend visiting family, and in three days we’re heading out of town again. Before we do, I have a somewhat daunting list of tasks to accomplish, so I’m trying to take them one at a time, too.

Meanwhile, while I was away, this lovely Woobu (wool/bamboo) yarn arrived from Blue Moon Fiber Arts.

These enormous skeins are each a half-pound, so this should be more than enough yarn for a sweater for my friend Tina. If I can figure out how to wind these monsters, I’ll wind off some little balls that I can use to swatch. I’m looking forward to trying the yarn out — I’ve never used Blue Moon yarn, nor have I ever knit with something that contains bamboo. It will be interesting to figure out how it will behave in sweater form.

Here’s a peek at the latest baby knit — a little cardigan called Harry. This is the back. The pattern was designed by Martin Storey for the most fetching book of baby knits I own, which is called (less fetchingly) Jaeger Handknits JB29. I’ve already finished one of the fronts, and I hope to finish the other today.

Because I have been a somewhat negligent blogger of late (too much work!), here are my responses to a meme for which Gryphon tagged me a while back.

1. What was I doing ten years ago?

I graduated from Grinnell College in May 1998, and then I headed straight to England, where I was an au pair for the summer in Harpenden, a small town to the north of London. When I got home, I picked up my stuff from storage in Iowa and drove to North Carolina, where I moved into my new apartment and got ready to begin graduate school. 

2. What are five things on my to-do list for today?

I am actively ignoring my to-do list, which contains a variety of uninteresting items. My true to-do list looks more like this: water plants, make lemon bars, take nap, knit cardigan front, make dinner. I have already achieved three of the five, and I’m on my way to do number four as soon as I finish writing this.

3. Snacks I enjoy:

Lemon bars and all sorts of other home-baked cookies, almonds, plain yogurt with a little maple syrup in it, corn chips and salsa, and apples with cheese are probably my favorites.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Aside from some small house and landscaping projects, I can’t think of many things I want to do that I can’t already afford to do except "give more money away." I’d want to give money to historical organizations, public libraries, scholarships for high school students who want to go to college, and homebirth/midwifery organizations. No doubt I’d come up with other worthy recipients.

5. Places I have lived:

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Oregon, Colorado, London, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.