Apologies

Hi Beloved Readers,

I'm having some technical difficulties with getting my phone to talk with flickr -- no pictures, so no updates. My actual camera is with my husband, who is working on a cruise ship this fall and therefore has far more interesting things to take pictures of than I do. Things like this:


And this:
And also this:
Okay, these are all pictures taken when I went to visit him in the Caribbean this fall. I didn't take any knitting with me.

I have done a ton of traveling this fall (this has been an amazing and unprecedented year in travel, on the whole), and only some knitting.

Updates:

• Minimalist Cardigan: still in limbo. I need to just order another darn skein of the yarn and be done with it. I have tried to find the right dye lot on Ravelry, and it just ain't happening. Did you even remember I was working on this one? It's been a looooong time.
• Labyrinth Rug: Need to buy the filler cord. I'm pretty close to done, have probably 2 feet of knitting to go. I plan to paint our bedroom soon, and this will be incentive to finish up the darn rug and put it in there!
• Have attempted the February Lady Sweater (Rav link) three times now, have frogged twice (I swear, I know how to read patterns, but apparently not this one) and gotten discouraged. I'm not sure I've chosen the right yarn -- and I think this particular yarn wants to be something else.
• Sent off the Owl Vest as-is, with a note saying I wouldn't be insulted if she wanted to get rid of the outlined owl, and instructions on how to do so. No photo of baby-in-vest yet, but I'm assured I can post it when she sends it.
• Have made fingerless mitts and an improvised headband-thingy to match.
• Have made baby booties for a Secret Santa gift.
• Am making mittens for a Christmas gift for my nephew. Yes, Selbu mittens. Sigh.

I swear, one day there will be pictures of these items. For now, just pretend you're on that beach. It's in Antigua. The water was wonderfully warm.

Kiki Mariko in Its Natural Habitat

I cleaned my entire house so I could take this picture. Also because I had a houseguest coming. Turns out, knitting a rug is a really great incentive to get your spring cleaning done. I'm not even convinced that it's spring yet, but now I've done my spring cleaning! Woo!


(Also, can you tell I'm trying to get a lot of blog mileage out of this rug? This is the end, I promise.)

Kiki Mariko

I don't quite know how it happened. I think I must have been putting myself to sleep -- I often fall asleep thinking about future knitting projects; it's much more conducive to relaxing than thinking about work -- and I decided that what our house really needs is the Kiki Mariko rug [Rav link], in the same wacky colors as we've painted the walls. Bright yellow, bright orange, bright red. Like I said, I'm not quite sure how the idea crawled its way into my head... but it made itself at home there. It may have had something to do with the fact that the house is coooooold in the winter, and a cozy wool rug may be something of a solution.

I already had two skeins of Lamb's Pride Bulky in creme from the swap, and a partial of an orange that I eventually decided was the wrong orange (ain't that always the way?), so I hied myself to Kaleidoscope to figure out what to do with this hankering to knit a ridiculously-colored fair-isle rug for my living room.

What I got did end up matching the walls perfectly, which makes me wonder: why the heck did I pick those crazy colors for my house? I like them a lot! I love my crazy-colored house! My yellow room makes me so happy! My red room is so cozy and comforting! My orange room... well, the orange looks really awesome with the red and the yellow, and I normally detest orange, but not in this case. And I do spend most of my time there, I'd say. But together? In the living room? (that's the orange one) This rug may end up being too much.

Actually, if it's horrible, or a bad size, Kiki will live in the yellow room, which is my office. There, the rug will be slightly less in the full-on pattern of traffic (and public eye), but still serve the warmth function quite nicely. I will be very appreciative on freezing February nights when I'm up writing my sermon.

I do kind of wish I'd forgone the black, or chosen brown instead -- I really had myself convinced that I needed another neutral, but now I'm not so sure it was necessary. The truth will reveal itself in the final product, after it's felted. I don't dislike it so much that I want to take the trouble of undoing all my work.

Anyway, after just a month of knitting (and the labyrinth rug has been a couple of years and I'm only halfway!) I'm pretty close to where I want to be. I think I want to knit the tube about 7' long, and I've probably got about 5' now. (My hope is that the length will be around 5 1/2 feet when its felted.) It's been a satisfyingly quick TV-knitting project, good for the end of a long day. And great for getting used to stranded knitting. I've really gotten the hang of the tension in my left hand, and my speed with two colors is almost what it is with just one. All in all, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself with this one.

Even Mother Nature Needs to Frog Sometimes

When we bought our current house, this was our front yard. The first pictures we ever saw of the house had huge vines growing up the front porch and into its roof (yeah, a problem, we know), but by the time we actually looked at the house, some smart person with a vested interest in selling had cut down the vines… leaving this pathetic and gnarly stump.

Last summer, the stump sprouted anew. I did not really have the energy to deal with it, except to cut the new baby vines and the branches that were small enough for my handheld garden clippers, and spray the darn thing with Roundup on a semi-regular basis until it stopped creating new shoots and tendrils.

Why is the poisoned stump in my front yard a subject for a knitting-and-sometimes-spirituality blog? Because today was the day I tackled the stump. And somewhere in the six hours it took me to remove the damn thing entirely, I had a knitting-and-spirituality-related revelation. So here goes.

It was a really beautiful day today. Amazingly so. After a sometimes-record-cold winter and a very unusually chilly and therefore protracted spring, today was a day when you could actually have hope that summer might come. I never saw a thermometer or a weather report, but there were rumors of temps in the 80s. A gorgeous, sunny day -- objectively "nice" weather, but also particularly nourishing for the spirit. I had planned to spend the day faithfully writing a sermon and doing other dutiful work things, but… that stump was calling to me, mocking me, daring me to ignore it for one more week (and watch, it’ll rain every Saturday for the next month and the darn thing will come back to life). And I just couldn’t let that stump tease me like that. After a quick trip to the hardware store, I was ready. Shovel: check. Hacksaw: check. Axe: okay, I didn’t buy an axe, and I probably should have, but the claw-side of a hammer ended up working almost as well in the end. Pretty green flower pot: check. I needed $5 more in my purchase total in order to use my $5 off coupon. That flower pot was free, dammit.

Back to the stump. I began shortly after 2:00 p.m. I dug and dug and dug, trying to get under the left-hand side of the stump, pulling up and sawing off as much of the root system as I could access. By 4:30 or so, I’d gotten this far:

Pretty respectable, I'd say. That pile of cut-off stump pieces is almost as big as the remaining stump, so that's some decent work there. I was feeling motivated, like I'd actually made some progress and I was going to use that momentum to do Great Things!

It was the next part, though, that brought my great revelation.

This second photo is from 6:30ish. I'd hacked away considerably at the stump and gotten to a corm-like structure -- not a solid piece of wood, but a giant snarl of branches that had wound around one another and grown together. And that's when I realized... I was untangling Mother Nature's mistake. I was picking apart a giant wooden knot. I was frogging.

I think that a part of me had been feeling guilty for pulling up and killing this living thing that is, in all probability, older than I am. That's part of why I avoided dealing with it last summer, and part of why I felt the need to dedicate a huge chunk of time all at once -- rather than kill it in pieces, I needed to kill it swiftly and justly. In spite of all the Roundupping I'd done last year, this venerable bush was still trying to send up little shoots again today. It was really hanging on. And I couldn't just cut up part of it and leave the base still struggling to live in my front yard. Once I saw that I wasn't really destroying so much as frogging, my task became so much easier to accept. Just like with frogging a knitted item that doesn't work, I was frogging this tangle of limbs so that something could grow in this space again.

Turns out, that final chunk took me nearly an hour to break open, but only about 10 minutes to disassemble once I figured out how to take it apart. It was almost a double-helix structure at its heart, spiraled around and around itself. I think Norah Gaughan would have appreciated its simplicity. There were some stubborn roots that just wouldn't give up (and a couple big'uns running under the porch, so I couldn't access them), but I managed to extract a lot of the root system before deciding it was time to let go and fill in the hole.

Right when the sun was headed down behind the trees at the end of the street (8ish), I managed to set the edging of my new flower bed, spread the dirt evenly, and plant some seeds. There will be sunflowers, marigolds, and "an assortment of wildflowers" poking their little noses up before long.Ain't creation grand?

Vermont Sweater

So, I finally got a job. In a church. This is what I've been working toward for the last two -- no, five -- no, seven years. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.

The last several months have been a whirlwind. Yeah, I got married. I've also been searching for a job (a "call" in church jargon). At the same time as planning a wedding. Oy!

So let me tell you the story of the Vermont Sweater.

In June, my denomination had its giant bi-annual nationwide meeting. I went, knowing that my Enormous Application Dossier would be available for nationwide distribution in the following week or so, intent on Networking. I emailed Regional People-In-Charge in the states I most wanted to focus on, asking for meetings. Let's talk about opportunities in your state, blah blah blah.

I had six "meetings" and met a ton of new people, which made me feel like the $300 I'd spent traveling was worth it. I worked HARD that weekend: one night, I woke up my roommate by sitting up in bed and saying "Hi! I'm HolyKnitter. It's so nice to meet you!"

I am not kidding. I was sleep-networking.

That was the weekend that I left my Secret Knitting (the Clementine Shawl) at my sister's house in Boston. I flew to Boston to stay with her, then took the bus to Hartford the next morning. I discovered that I'd left my knitting when I got on the bus, all ready to settle in to a couple of hours of uninterrupted sitting time. Luckily, my sis had given me her copy of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off, so I wasn't completely out of knitting luck.

Fortunately, my first destination that weekend was a church in West Hartford, where I spent a day in a workshop with other clergy under the age of 40. Fortunately, I'm a good Yarn Tourist, and had already done my research... when we broke into interest groups ("Single Clergy," "Clergy in Small Towns," etc.), I organized the knitters to go around the corner to Sit 'N Knit. The original plan involved meeting up with other group members in the local pub (the "Clergy Who Like Beer" group), but had such a great time chatting with the women in the store that we lost all track of time and completely blew off our new friends. I guess that makes us the Clergy who Like Yarn More Than Beer.

Anyway, if you ever find yourself in West Hartford, go there. Because those women almost convinced me that I wanted to move to Connecticut.

Almost. I did meet with The Guy From Connecticut the next day. He almost convinced me, too. Almost.

Anyway, I left my knitting at my sister's house. And I was at a conference. Conference = LOTS of time to knit while listening to someone talk (talking heads included Bill Moyers and Barack Obama. Spectacular.) So I had to buy enough yarn for a sweater, just in case.

The yarn I bought was a Green Mountain Spinnery misty-forest-green worsted. Eight skeins. I cast on for Stefanie Japel's Cozy V-Neck Pullover that day. After three days of Conferencing, I had just about the entire body done. Yeah.

And the arms took another, um, four months or so. But then again, I was working on my Secret Knitting and getting married and looking for jobs.

(Also on the Yarn Tourism front, my hotel that weekend was at the same highway exit as Creative Fibers. I skipped church on Sunday morning to walk -- yes, WALK -- under the sidewalk-less overpass, breakfasted at Dunkin Donuts, and then continued down and across the road to Creative Fibers, which was closed. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for the nose-shaped grease marks on the windows. Looks like a great store, just don't go on Sunday mornings, because they're not open.)

BUT! After my failed attempt at Yarn Tourism, I went back to my hotel, showered, changed, and met with The Woman From Vermont. And we lunched for an hour and a half. At the end of our conversation, she mentioned a little church just outside of Burlington, VT. "I know you're looking for a full-time job, and this is only three-quarters, but I think you'd be a really good fit for this church. They have a shawl-knitting ministry, even. I'll send you their information so you can give it some thought."

And give it some thought I did.

Y'all, I must have interviewed with ten or twelve churches. I must have read up on and NOT applied for ten. I must have gotten "thanks but no thanks" letters from twenty more. I know I turned down at least three who placed beautiful offers at my feet and tried to beat down my door. None of them felt right.

This little church just outside of Burlington did. And, thankfully, they felt as enthusiastic about me as I do about them. I'm moving in two weeks! We've already bought a house, now we just have to sell the one down here.

Throughout this whole process, I was working on my green sweater. From the Conference, through a couple of plane rides between home and Atlanta for wedding stuff (I must admit, it was nice to have a big "public" project to work on that wasn't the Secret Knitting -- my husband had NO idea I was working on something else), the car ride up and back, and then a trip up to Vermont to interview at this wonderful little church that liked me enough to fly me and my husband up there for the weekend.

The search committee knew that I'm a knitter. And they were trying to sell me on their town. So they took me to Kaliedoscope Yarns. These people are no fools.

I showed the green sweater to the search committee, and they were thoroughly impressed. I finished sewing up the second sleeve of the sweater as we drove away from Burlington (flew out of Boston, got to visit my sister too!), and decided that this is the Vermont Sweater. The yarn came from Vermont in the first place, and every stitch brought me through the job search process to the other side: Burlington! I still haven't blocked it, but that didn't stop me from wearing it to snuggle with my new nephew that weekend.

Meet Nando. That's short for Ferdinando. Silly name aside, he is the most adorable bulldog puppy I have seen since I was a little kid and our dog had puppies. Wow, he's a great dog.


Anyway, at Olivia's request, I'll be posting updates on our new house here, as well. We bought a fixer-upper in a historic district in Burlington (two blocks from Downtown!), and it needs a lot of work, because nothing's been done to this place for 40 years, and it's been sitting empty for at least three. Since it is a 1910-built house in a historic district, we're eligible for lots of historic preservation grants from the city. It's an exciting adventure, but it means I probably will have fewer knitting and more lead-paint-removal updates for a while. I'll try to keep up with both, but I will be a little internet-restricted for a while since neither my house nor my church has internet access, so we'll see about that. I foresee lots of coffee shop time in my future. Good thing I will be able to walk to, like, five of them from my new house!