Peaceful Knitter

This year’s trip to blustery Michigan proved to be one of the most relaxing and productive family trips on record. Not only did I get hours on end in the car to knit and listen to knitting podcasts, I also got to enjoy long days of knitting at my in-law’s house. As I type this, my fingers ache from over-exertion! My forearms feel a bit tingly and sore. I actually had to take a day off from knitting today so they could recover! Seriously, I do need to get to the gym, if only to strengthen my hands and arms for increased endurance.

Before we arrived at our final destination, Sweetie and I stopped over in Indiana for a reunion with some old friends. We were greeted warmly, treated to lots of homecooked food, games, and some demonstrations of our friend N’s newly acquired police training skills. Turns out, it does hurt to get hit in the chest with a police baton, even if you’re wearing a Kevlar vest. And I got the opportunity to see if I could wriggle out of a set of handcuffs. It looks so easy in the movies when people sit down and scooch their hips in between their arms and suddenly their hands are in front instead of behind them. (see No Country for Old Men if you want a truly impressive example of what can go awry if a detainee can accomplish this!) I was not successful.

And while this may sound like the best part of our time in Indiana, it got even more interesting when I asked K to teach me how to crochet. How to crochet a granny square, specifically. K is a prolific afghan crocheter, and I knew she was just the gal to get me started on an alternate yarn activity.

My 1st Granny Square!

Turns out it’s not too bad! I think knowing how to knit really helped me pick up the pattern pretty quickly, and in just 1 hour I had this baby put to bed.

Fast forward to Michigan on Christmas eve where we all gathered to exchange gifts. I gifted a pair of wristwarmers to my mother- and sister-in-law, who both reacted enthusiastically.

I had put each pair in an old Mason jar onto which I attached a label that said “Handmade for You” and gave fiber and care information. Little did I know those weren’t the only handmade gifts lurking under the tree…

May I present The Swing Coat:

What’s a girl to do when she reaches into a gift bag and feels something soft and furry? Hope for a kitten? Maybe a nice throw for the couch? In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined what I was about to receive. The room was tense with anticipation at my response since everyone there already knew what was in the bag. There was a slight pause between the moment I recognized that this was a furry garment and when I reacted with an inhuman amount of enthusiasm.

I did what every good person whose mother-in-law has just spent hours sewing her a furry blue coat: I stood up, put it on, and did some twirls for everyone. And a couple of nights later, when company came over, I did it again, making sure to smile and effuse compliments to the seamstress. Because that is what you do when someone makes you something with their own mind and hands and heart. You graciously accept, and you compliment, and you appreciate all their hard work. I will probably never wear this coat again, but I know the time and the love that went into it, and for that I will always treasure it.

I also got some crochet-embellished towels

That’s our 3rd and final pet, Maxwell P. Nubbins.  He has no tail or patience for other animals.

Best of all my gifts were these, about which no explanation is required:

Our drive out to Michigan provided me with some much-needed uninterrupted knitting time. After about 13 hours in the car, I am now 3/4 of the way through my lace scarf (nevermind that it was supposed to be a Christmas gift!), and 80% finished with the first Jaywalker.  Thankfully I don’t get carsick while knitting in motion…

I frogged the sock back to the ribbing after my last post and reworked the pattern. It was my own error in counting that caused the traveling stitches. Much better! It’s amazing how fudging something up, studying it a little, and reworking it can make your end product so much better. It’s not only more beautiful to look at now, but I feel a little more confident in my ability to read my own knitting and problem solve. I am noticing now that the fabric does not stretch as much as I thought it would, so it may be a little tight. Since I’m past the heel at this point, I don’t think I’ll be frogging it, but if I were to make another pair I would either make the larger size or modify it myself.

Christmas went well, and I received a couple of useful knitting gifts.  I will post more about those later when I can add some photos.  Until then, keep merry and bright!

Dear readers,

I will be going into holiday hibernation tomorrow. We are loading up the car and heading to Michigan for 10 days, and I cannot make any promises as to whether or not I will be posting. Right now I am writing when I should probably be packing provisions for the trip. I would rather be looking at knitting sites and writing here than thinking about how cold it will be in Northern MI and how many pairs of thermal underwear I should be packing.

The in-laws do have wireless at their house, so I could take my laptop…

All the presents have been packed and stacked by the door with care:

We always try to gift lightly, meaning we try to buy small, easily transportable gifts for family who are traveling (ourselves included). Things that can be put in the checked baggage and will survive a cross-country flight, for example. And I always hope to leave Christmas at my in-laws with less than we arrived with. This never seems to happen, however, and while I appreciate their generous gift-giving, I can’t let go of the year they gave us a queen size bed-in-a-bag. We were flying home for Pete’s sake! Oh, the number of times we’ve had to ship boxes home to ourselves because we couldn’t get them home on a plane… Fortunately for us, we’re driving this year, so the loot can expand to fit the confines of our car.

There’s always room behind the front seats for my knitting bag, I make sure of that. I will be taking the slow-going Easy Flame Lace Scarf, the yarn and pattern for the Citrus Yoke Pullover, and the Jaywalker socks I started this week.  Yes, I have reluctantly jumped on the Jaywalker bandwagon, but after some research found that it’s probably the best pattern for the yarn I already had.  So what if I’m a knitting lemming, joining the thousands of people who have already cast on.  I’ll just have to accept that some things are popular for good reason, and this may be one of them.

Jaywalker Socks by Grumperina in Knit Picks Felici in Atmosphere

This is the first time I have knit with this yarn, and it is wonderful so far. It’s a superwash merino/nylon blend, so it’s soft, a little bit stretchy, and the color is wonderful. I plan on making these for a friend’s birthday in the first week of January. Since I must be one of the world’s slowest sock knitters, I plan on working almost exclusively on these while away, damn the conseqeunces!

I have run into a couple of snags while knitting the cuff of the first sock, and can’t decide if I should frog back and start over…

Can you see what I’m talking about?

It’s there, on the right hand side of the sock: my imperfect stitch counting on the decreases. This is a simple knit 7, kfb, knit 7, sssk pattern, but for some reason I had trouble lining up my decreases in the beginning. Also, the ribbing is super stretchy, and since my friend does not have elephantiasis of the leg, I’m a little worried. The ribbing stretches farther than the leg; is this a problem? Should I knit the ribbing in smaller needles and switch when I get to the stitch pattern?  Should I ignore it and keep a knittin’?

I think I can put off packing a little bit longer while I look this up on Ravelry…

Happy Holidays!

As I was listening to my iPod this weekend, I decided that he looked awfully cold and electronic. Stan the Nan as we call him, just dangles from the ears in a tangle of white cords looking like every other nano on the block. So I decided to delve into my scrap stash and whip up a little something cozy.

Cozies BEFORE felting

As I was finishing up, I remembered someone in my knitting group once suggested using a kitchen mixer to felt smaller items. So, I put a kettle of water on to boil and pulled out my trusty KitchenAid mixer.

Set the speed to low and let the cozies agitate in boiling hot water for about 15 minutes. Do not fill the bowl too full or put the speed up too high, or you will have hot water dangerously sloshing everywhere!

I squeezed the excess water out, stuffed them full of plastic wrap, and let the cozies dry overnight.

Spike wanted to help choose a button

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that the 2nd cozy didn’t turn out so well. It seems that the main yarn wasn’t feltable wool as I had assumed, and strange things happened to it during felting.

You can really see what happens when you mix wool with acrylic and felt it; the wool shrinks up and pulls the stitches surrounding it inward. I’m calling this one Frankenfelt.

I thought I’d make a quick pair of fingerless gloves for my mother-in-law (okay, it wasn’t entirely my idea, but I’m in a generous mood). There was an unassigned ball of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran and a couple of free patters in my stash that I thought would be perfect. I have knit 2 pairs of Fetching with the same yarn, and love the feel of it. It’s also very nice to wear, even though it does get a bit of a fuzzy halo.* Interesting side note: my pair of mitts accidentally got thrown into the dryer (as so many of my hand knits do) and survived just fine.

They knit up incredibly fast in a 2×2 cable rib pattern on size 6 needles using about 3/4 of the skein.

A Little Twist Wristwarmers

This was my first time doing a Make 1 (m1), however, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the thumb gusset looked after knitting the first mitt. So, after some coaching from a friend at Stitch ‘n Bitch, I ripped out the entire thing. This is something I rarely, if ever, do. I look at knitting as something to be relaxed about, and if the mistake won’t affect the usability or the aesthetic of the end product, I leave it. But I was interested in perfecting a new technique, I suppose, and wanted to get it right.

I still need to sew in the ends, and there are a couple of gaps that I’d like to go back and seam up. I was just so excited to finish and take a photo! I get extremely motivated to finish a project just so I can write a post and change the status on Ravelry to Finished! Hey, whatever works, right?

*This yarn also turned my bamboo needles blue. Has this ever happened to you?

I’ve been listening to the Stash and Burn podcasts lately (see previous post) and have been contemplating the stash habits of knitters. This knitter, in particular. I thought I had a lot of yarn, but apparently I am a mouse among giants with a stash count on Ravelry of 20.

Here it is, my meager stash:

I also have 12 skeins of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky waiting to be made into a sweater:

As a monogamous knitter, I don’t buy much yarn. I like to only buy yarn for a specific project, knit it up, and not have any leftovers. If it sits around for too long, I start to feel a little anxious, a little trampy. The yarn calls out to me with snide comments like “I’ve been sitting in this box since August; when are you going to knit with me?” and “I thought you were going to knit socks next.”

Since I started going to a local Stitch ‘n Bitch meetup next to a yarn store, my stash numbers have increased. We’ll sit and knit for a couple of hours, then an innocent-acting enabler will casually ask “Is anyone going over to the yarn store?” More often than not, we’ll all walk over together to ooh and ahh and fondle the new yarn and books. Some weeks, we all leave with bags bursting with wool, and a spring in our collective step. Other weeks, no one buys anything.

Personally, I am on a small yarn diet. I told myself that when my yarn box was full I couldn’t buy yarn until there was a place for it. That means I must knit before I buy. Of course, there is the small matter of my leftover vase…

What’s a girl to do with all these bits and pieces of yarn? Knitting the Jingle Bell collar helped a tiny bit, and there’s plenty of cotton to make a couple of washcloths. But what else is there? What do you do with your scrap yarn?

And while I’m showing you the inner sanctum of my knitting habits, here’s a flash of my needle collection:

I use wood and bamboo double points and circular needles for just about everything I knit. The straight needles are leftovers from when I first started knitting and thought I’d be thrifty by buying cheap plastic needles. I don’t think I’ve knit anything more than a single washcloth and hat on them! My most recent acquisition is the Harmony sock needle set from Knit Picks.

Oh, how quickly we knitters learn to favor the finer things.

I can’t stop thinking about knitting.

And yet I don’t seem to be knitting all that much.

I’m addicted to virtual knitting, or reading about yarn, patterns, and other people’s projects online. Blogs, Ravelry, Knitty, etc. have me transfixed, and instead of using my spare moments to knit a few rows, I use them to read about knitting. Here is my daily reading list:

Ravelry

Knit & Tonic

The Yarn Harlot

Lolly Knitting Around

Of course, as I read these, I am inevitably drawn into other websites, increasing the amount of time I spend reading about knitting. I love to see photos of yarn, works in progress, new patterns, and can never stop at just one.

I think I’ll blame Ravelry. You see, this all started when I got my invite into the coven of knitting. First, I loaded all my FOs into the site, then joined a few groups, then started looking for new things to knit, and got distracted by links to people’s blogs, and before long, an hour or a week or, in my case 2 months have passed with very little knitting to show for it all. Actually, I have been really good about finishing projects more quickly because I am excited to post them onto this blog, or change the status on my project page in Ravelry.

To make matters worse (or better, depending) I just discovered knitting podcasts. If the cleanliness of my house, the balance of my checkbook, and the neatness of my laundry basket haven’t suffered enough, they’re about to. Of course, the upside to listening to podcasts is that you can do other things at the same time. Ideally, you could knit. Or you can listen while you work, drive, fold laundry, or grocery shop (people looked at me and my earbuds a little strangely today at Stop & Shop). Podcasts are also a great friend when you can’t sleep at night but want to stay in bed.

I’m currently working my way through all the episodes of Stash and Burn. Their conversational style is easy to listen to while doing other things, and there’s ample information about knitting, their projects, yarn, etc. These girls are smart, funny, and interesting to listen to. And the music is fun too.

Also enjoyable is the new podcast, Yarncraft. These ladies are also enjoyable to listen to, once you get past all the adverts for Lion Brand yarn and the NYC background noise. They recently had a long interview with Stephanie Pearl-McPhee which was wonderful.

Knitpicks has a very informative podcast as well, but I find Kelly Petkun’s reading a little hard to listen to. She is clearly reading aloud, and she does so very slowly. But the content is rich and educational.

So this is what’s keeping me from my knitting (and household chores) lately. Perhaps this is why my lace scarf is progressing so very slowly…

I am thrilled to report that I finally finished the chunky Landscapes hat. It started out as a stash-busting quick knit, and turned out to be not so quick (see post UFO Delivers Frog for the details). After some recalculation, I eventually ended up with a hat that fits my head, but omitted the earflaps that were called for in the pattern. I love the big stitches and the color changes in the yarn.

Basic stockinette hat in Lion Brand Landscapes yarn in Country Sunset.

In more exciting news, I also designed my first item, a knitted dog collar. We do not dress up our dog as a rule, but the urge is there aroung the holidays to put Big Martha in something festive. This usually consists of nothing more than a themed bandana. But this year we will be taking the dog with us to visit family for the holidays, and I wanted to get something extra special. After searching a few local pet stores for something with a jingle bell or a Christmas tree I came up empty handed. And that’s when it occurred to me: I could knit something!

I immediately began thinking of places to get large jingle bells and what stash yarn I could use to knit up a collar or bandana. Fortunately, I had a couple of shades of green lying around, so all I had to do was get some inexpensive red yarn and some bells for the project.

May I present Martha’s Jingle Bell Collar:

I simply knit a tube to fit twice the width of the collar. When I got to the middle and changed colors, I just slid a bell onto the yarn before I started knitting with it and then pulled it up when I got to the front. I knit until I reached then point of the metal leash loop and decided to make a button hole to slip it through. Then I knit another inch or so, bound off, and slid the tube onto an old collar.

The dog comes right to me when she hears the bells a jinglin’. I think it helps put her in the holiday spirit too!

Forgive the boring transcript style entry below, but this was just too good to be told in narrative form. It comes to me from a conversation my sweetie had with a very good friend of ours. They both have advanced degrees.

Transcript:

Sweetie: Do you know what you’re getting your wife for Christmas?

Physics Guy: No, do you?

Sweetie: I’m trying to think of ideas.

Physics Guy: Jewelry is always good.

Sweetie: Yeah, I got her jewelry last year.

Physics Guy: Trips are good.

Sweetie: She wants to go on a knitting getaway trip.

Physics Guy: They have those?

Sweetie: They have, like, cruises.

Physics Guy: They have cruises for everything. I heard about a cruise for people who need dialysis. They just shut down for an hour and everyone goes and gets dialysis.

Sweetie: You know what I could get her? A thing that winds the yarn into balls.

Physics Guy: That seems like a good time saver.

Sweetie: I don’t know why the yarn just doesn’t come in balls in the first place.

Physics Guy: Yeah! Why doesn’t it?

Sweetie: I have no idea. Someone has to sit there an hold it while the knitter winds it up. It’s boring.

Physics Guy: It should be a service from the yarn store. Like when they shake the paint can for you at the paint store.

Sweetie: There must be a reason why it doesn’t come in balls. There are too many people who are really into knitting for this “yarn in balls” idea to be revolutionary.

Physics Guy: What could the reason be? There don’t seem to be any down sides.

Sweetie: Maybe they can’t see the pattern of the yarn if it’s in balls.

Physics Guy: Maybe.

Sweetie: I’ll ask Sonia

End Transcript.

I’m still pretty new to knitting, and since I don’t have a ball winder or swift of my own, I have to do it the old fashioned way. But I think the reason the yarn doesn’t come wound in balls is preservation of the fiber. When you wind the yarn, it causes the fibers to stretch, putting them under strain and potentially damaging or changing the way the yarn will knit up later. Some knitters don’t wind their yarn into balls or cakes until they are ready to knit with it, others have theirs wound at the yarn store.

Does anyone know of any other reasons? 

How and when do you wind your yarn?

And by the way, I would like a “thing that winds yarn into balls” for Christmas.

It was a cold a dreary morning here in New England, the kind of wet, wintry day that makes you want to stay home and knit. We got our first snow yesterday, but nothing really stuck around. Instead, it melted and froze, causing things to be dangerously slippery. I was able to get some festive photos, though.

Yes, we’re those people that already have their Christmas lights up. And not the tasteful, softly twinkling clear lights. No, we like to muster up a little nostalgia of simpler times and put up the large multi-colored strands of lights. They provide a truly warm glow, a beacon of holiday cheer. And they won’t burn the house down, unlike the earlier generations.

After going out and fighting with the wet weather for a bit (it’s not fun to haul groceries into the house when its sleeting), I got a nice yarny surprise. A couple of months ago I joined a knitting swap which was supposed to include all the goods: yarn, a project bag, and some notions.

Here are just a few of the things my swap partner Lisa sent me:

Big Martha likes how the wool smells.

Spike likes how the wool smells too.

And I like how these smell.

Lisa also sent me a sock pattern, plenty of needles, a stitch holder, a cute book about gardening, and a project bag. It was a perfect surprise for a dreary, recovering from a head cold, don’t feel like going outside kind of day. Thank you!