Laundry List -- or finishing list, in this case

You know it's been a long time since you've updated your blog when your mom sends you an email saying "what have you been knitting lately?"

The truth is, I've been knitting a ton this summer. I can't put the needles down. I went to a wedding last night, and seriously considered bringing with me the Dashing that's in rotation now -- I mean, it's small, nobody will see me if I pull it out during the ceremony, right? Thank goodness I didn't, as there were only about 30 people at this wedding, and we were sitting around in a circle on a boat/barge, and knitting would have been very conspicuous and rude, since I was only about 5 feet away from the huppah.

Anyway, my point is, I'm turning into one of those women who has an "I'd rather be knitting" bumper sticker on her car. (Figuratively. I hate all stickers in real life: they give me the heebie-jeebies.) So that's why I haven't been blogging. It's too hard to knit and blog at the same time. I don't have enough fingers.

I don't have pictures of everything I've done lately. Heck, I haven't even put them all into Ravelry. I've lost track of all my projects, but here's a quick update. You're welcome, Mom.

• Labyrinth Rug -- in progress (still)
• Surprise Project for Woman who works in Coffee Shop -- in progress (this is a Sunday afternoon knitting group thing; more after we give it to her); somehow I have become the person designated to collect and hang on to everybody's contributions.
  
• Blue Cotton Sweater is done! All the way done! I've been wearing it lots.
  
• Mittens for Husband and Matching Mitts for Me (awwww...) -- Lopi. Done except for weaving in ends
• Red Teddy Bear for Sister's Baby -- knitting is done, need to stuff and sew together.
  
• Also, the bride of the wedding I went to yesterday wants me to make this same teddy bear in yellow for her daughter's bun-in-the-oven. And she will pay me. Score! I guess that makes me a knitting professional.
  
• Generic Christmas Stocking -- in progress, using leftover scraps, mostly Lopi.
  
• Blanket-with-Sleeves: done, except that I need to sew it together.
• Snow White Cable Hat - Lopi. Done in two nights. Um, I do need to weave in the ends. I hate finishing, have you noticed?
• I started Dashing this weekend, and have been making fast progress. I'm almost done with the first mitt, and am enjoying the ease and speed of this pattern that I'm thinking this may be "the year HolyKnitter gave everyone the same damn gloves for Christmas" I'm using some very moth-eaten Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift (right), doubled, and doing quite a bit of spit-splicing.
• And this weekend I met up with many friends (and met many new friends) at the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. I bought yarn (a cone of 2,250 yards of nameless DK wool for $15! wooo!), I saw my farm people (Hi Kim!), and I ate a lamb burger. Mmm! All in all, a good time. So good, I forgot to take pictures.
  

I feel like there might be more that I've forgotten. Seriously productive summer. I've also been swatching some unnamed superwash wool for Christmas donations (also with my Sunday afternoon knitting group). Anyway, there you go, Mom. And everybody else.

Christmas in July???

I am suddenly having the weird urge to knit Christmas stuff. Stockings, ornaments, a tree skirt... this has never happened to me before.

But it must be time to pull out my Handknit Holidays and see what I can do.

SHEEP!

I have been knitting up a storm. I just haven't been blogging much. But today I went on a Farm and Fiber Tour in central Vermont. I bought a CSA share in a farm there, and got a box of chocolate-brown wool (already spun, worsted weight) and other homemade Vermont goodies... and then Husband and I got to visit my farm!

So here I am on the farm. I am about certain that the sheep from whom my yarn was made is that brown one just over my left shoulder in this photo. She matches the pictures that the farm gave me with my yarn (and the owner told me so). Belle's wool was blended with another sheep's (Azalea -- not pictured, she was sold two weeks before), but it's mostly hers. Lucky lucky Husband gets a sweater or something made out of this yarn.

We also visited two other farms. One had Shetland Sheep (the sheep above are Romneys), which are smaller and have different faces. The Shetlands were less comfortable being around people, and we had to use a grain mixture to entice them to come anywhere near us. The whole flock except for three very brave sheep ran away when we entered the pasture. Only two would get close enough for me to feed them.

The other farm was also a woolworks, and by the time we got there the sheep had packed off and gone to a completely different part of the farm -- they were done with the humans. So we toured the woolworks for a while, which was fascinating. The owner washes, cards, and felts or bats wool for lots of local farmers; she has a neighbor who dyes and spins the wool, or she sends it to other spinneries like Green Mountain to be processed into yarn.

All in all, a great day. And I am psyched to start working with this yummy yarn. Mmmm, chocolate sweater-y goodness...

Blame It on the Yarn Fumes

Kaleidoscope Yarns had a giant "warehouse" sale a couple of weeks ago. By "warehouse," they meant that they borrowed an empty room in the office building next door to the shop. And by "giant," I mean that "I haven't seen this much sale yarn since Dunwoody Yarns broke my heart by closing two years ago."

What with my flexible-schedule-having and all, I was totally there an hour before the store opened on Friday morning. It was kind of an accident -- I said I'd meet Emily there about 9:30 or so -- but I also woke up that morning with some rare energy that usually only strikes at 11 p.m. I'm not a morning person. And I was out the door at, like, 8:30. I usually can't manage to open my eyes before 8:30. And not only had I showered, eaten breakfast, and gotten dressed, I'd also taken the Yarn Harlot's advice and prepared a list of what I was going to buy at the sale.

The list read: superwash wool; cotton; Blue Sky Alpaca and Silk; yarn!

Perhaps not the most effective list, but it helped me to focus. I was not messing around with books or notions or knitting bags. My sister's having a baby, and I need to start buying some damn baby-friendly yarn.

Friends, I scored at that sale. I scored big-time. I went over budget by $50, but I got everything on my list. And a fifty-cent hank of the finest purple alpaca ever spun. Seriously. Amazing. (And no, I will probably never actually do anything with it.)

So a couple of weeks ago, as I was looking for something new to bring to my Sunday afternoon knitting group -- because I was at the finishing point with my blanket-with-sleeves, and I am not carting that entire project with me to be miserable sewing the seams twenty times -- I discovered a horrible mistake that I made at the Kaleidoscope sale:

I bought four skeins of Blue Sky Alpacas cotton yarn, all navy (or "indigo" as they call it -- but it's totally navy). I just happen to have the leaflet with their Eyelet Cardigan pattern, which calls for four skeins of their Dyed Cotton or Organic Cotton... and y'all, I bought two skeins of each. Okay, technically I bought two skeins of Dyed Cotton and two of "Blue Sky Cotton," and they are actually the same yarn, but the names and labels on these particular skeins are different enough that I should have noticed I was not purchasing four of the same exact thing!

Somehow, what with all the yarn fumes in that "warehouse" sale room, I completely didn't stop to read labels or check dye lots (or look at much of anything but prices). Nor did I notice that the two yarns have completely different tags on them. I looked in this bin and thought "cotton! That's on my list! And it's blue! And each skein is $4!" And that's about as far as I got with that thought process. Whoops.

Had to be the yarn fumes. Had to be.

So now I've got to be careful on the knitting end and be sure to alternate my skeins. And wash very gently. Good thing I decided that the yarn wanted to be a sweater for me, and not something for my sister's baby. Whew!

Also, I am loving both pattern and yarn. Both are a total pleasure to knit. So hooray for that.

Blanket-with-sleeves

I have this sweater. I bought it in a store, it isn't homemade. It's a terribly unflattering shape and color, and I would never wear it in public. But it's perfect for throwing on over my pjs and curling up in front of the TV at night.

I do kind of hate it, though. But I think that what I really hate about it, besides the drabness and the shape, is that I wear it aaaaallllllllll the time, and that makes me feel boring.

Solution: knit another one.

In a closing-sale yarn-fume-fueled haze a couple of years ago, I bought eight (or maybe ten?) skeins of a gorgeously-hideous handspun from Ingeborg Michels Naturwolle. Chunky singles, some skeins are pretty uniform and some are a bit badly-spun thick-n-thin. Think tomato, mustard, sage, cream, and horseradish, all marled together in somewhat random combinations. It's incredibly beautiful when it's all rolled up in a lovely hank o yarn, but really not something that you want to put on your body. And I ended up with eight (or maybe ten) skeins of this stuff. Oy.

But! I think it'll be the perfect yarn for making a watching-TV sweater.

The pattern I chose is the Wraparound Jacket from Erika Knight's Classic Knits. Turns out this isn't the greatest yarn for the pattern. It's not quite super-chunky, and a thicker yarn would have been better. Or maybe I should have just used slightly smaller needles, 13s instead of 15s, perhaps. Anyway, the yarn has stretched and gotten droopy (wool singles will do that), and the front of the sweater just about hangs down to my knees. Good thing no one will ever see the sweater on me. I have yet to attach the sleeves. Or, rather, I've tried to attach one sleeve and did it badly, so I've got to rip out the four feet of mattress stitch I've done and start over.

Anyway, this sweater is a giant blanket with sleeves. Which is exactly what I wanted. Just in time for summer. D'oh.


(Also, the leader of the Ingeborg Michels Fanclub on Ravelry emailed me and asked me to post my sweater pics to her club, because the sweater is "such an inspiration." So thanks for the wonderful flattery, Annette!)

The Well-Traveled Surprise (Jacket)

So, my sister's having a baby. It's due on my birthday, actually, but we all know how well babies stick to their due dates. The sex of the child is not yet known, but we do know that it's healthy, dammit. There was some significant concern in this area, and lots of scary genetic testing both before and after my sister became pregnant. So we know for certain that the baby is a-okay. Hallelujah!

I've had my eye on the Baby Surprise Jacket pattern (Ravelry link) for a long time. I think I probably discovered it through Brooklyn Tweed like everyone else on the planet, and marveled vicariously online at the genius of the construction. Then I saw an un-seamed sample of it at Woolcott and Company in Cambridge and marveled in person at the genius of the construction. I put the BSJ in my Ravelry queue -- which doesn't necessarily mean anything for me, but in this case I really was serious. And then my friend Aubrey (who hasn't updated her blog in so long that she might as well be blogless) lent me the pattern. And I was confused by it at first, like everyone else on the planet, so I can attest that I probably would not have made it through this pattern if I didn't have Dawn Adcock's row-by-row guide. Use it! Thank you, Dawn!

Now, I just happen to have had this awesome skein of Mountain Colors Weavers Wool Quarters (colorway "steelhead," perfect for fall/winter, and nicely free of gendered-color constraints) marinating in my stash, rescued from the sale basket at Cast-On Cottage, like, four years ago. Back when they were under snotty "we will only acknowledge your presence if you've already been through menopause" ownership. (I hear the new owner is really nice. But now I've moved.) I dug out this skein of Mountain Colors, and my size 7 circs, and cast-on.

And then I went to California to officiate a wedding. Husband and the BSJ came along for the ride. We flew in to San Francisco (there is SO MUCH time for knitting when you're flying from Burlington, VT, to SF, CA!), rented a convertible, went to Chinatown for some dim sum, hit up Artfibers, and then took two days to drive down the coast to LA. We stopped and saw friends and family along the way. We went to the street market in San Luis Obispo. We saw the elephant seals molting on the beach. I did my best Jackie O impersonation (imagine the scarf up over my hair). I drove most of the way, which means I did not knit. Not on the Big Sur Highway! And then we made it to LA, where Husband promptly got food poisoning and was laid up in bed for about 48 hours. I had to eat both his entree and mine at the wedding. And I had lots of time for knitting.

It turns out that MC's Weavers Wool Quarters is pretty much the perfect yarn for the BSJ. Perfect, as if EZ herself had special-ordered the yarn just for this project. It's very evenly dyed, and the math worked out nicely so there's pretty much no pooling. The yarn itself felt amazing as it sliped through my fingers onto the needles. And after it was over, there was maybe 10 yards left of a 350-yard skein. Impressive. I knitted up the sweater in about three days, discovered I'd made a mistake and ripped back a few inches, reknit it on the plane to Seattle -- we flew on buddy passes and had to be rerouted, which turned out to be awesome because neither of us had ever been to Seattle, and a favorite-but-rarely-seen branch of my family lives up there, so we got to see them and tour the city and eat amazing seafood at Fisherman's Terminal -- and finished seaming the shoulders at my Sunday afternoon knitting group the next weekend.

And I was totally ready to cast-on for the next one. But that's all the Mountain Colors yarn I had. I do have a couple of green (superwash) balls of Laines du Nord Giunco that might work well, but... it's not Mountain Colors.

Fortunately, at the Kaleidoscope Yarns Anniversary Sale last week, I snagged a random skein of MC's 4/8s Wool in the "sagebrush" colorway (very springy, and also conveniently genderless). For $6. It's not enough yarn for a full BSJ, since it's only a 250-yard skein, but I found someone on Ravelry who's going to sell me another skein of the same stuff. So I may cast-on for BSJ #2 (on size 8 needles this time, because Sister's Baby needs something to wear in the springtime when it's grown a little bit) pretty soon. I may never get tired of this pattern. Or this yarn. Hooray!

My sister doesn't yet know about the BSJs she's got coming to her. She will when she reads this, though. Surprise! It's a jacket!

These mittens have sound effects.

I don't consider myself a knitwear designer by any stretch of the imagination. But I do occasionally have flashes of inspiration, sparked by some kind of need I encounter in my daily life. Last year, while I was working at the elementary school getting kids in wheelchairs off the bus at a miserable ridiculously-early-and-ridiculously-cold 7 a.m. every day, I loved the utility of my beautiful Last Minute Knitted Gifts wristwarmers, but my fingers still got cold during those between-bus waiting periods.

So I decided that I needed a pair of those awesome mittens with the half-fingers tucked inside the flap. And I couldn't really find a good pattern I liked, so I just made one up. I borrowed elements from Amy Singer's flappy mittens, and also from the gloves in Last Minute, I think.

I knitted the first one in Atlanta, and half of the second one -- but then I lost my enthusiasm for the project (something about spring, and not needing them so much anymore... and getting engaged and looking for jobs...) and I apparently lost the paper on which I wrote the recipe of what I did on the first glove. So I spent several afternoons picking at the finished glove and trying to figure out what the heck I did the first time around so I can do it again in reverse.

And yes, I am trying to make all the spirals go in reverse, so I double- and triple- and quadruple-check everything. I've ripped out the pinkie and first fingers so many times that I lost count! But here they are.

The yarn is Malabrigo, size 8 needles on the body and flap, size 6 on the fingers. I should have done the ribbing on 6s, but I didn't. Am considering ripping the ribs from the bottom and redoing, but am also lazy and decided that I'd rather get to wear these for at least a little bit of this winter.

And I say the mittens have sound effects because you all you can see is blue when the flap is closed -- and then "whap-shah!" Yellow!

I WANT!!!!!

OMG I want this lamp that knits its own shade.

Whoever thought to put a lightbulb kit inside a knitting machine is an absolute genius. I'd throw myself to the ground in an offer of marriage, but, well, I'm not so into polygamy.

Happy Easter! (yes, a day early -- Happy Holy Saturday doesn't quite have the same ring to it.)

I've got another post in the works, but I have to take pictures first. Soon, I promise.