PIDGE!

I hope your Christmas was lovely. Mine was pretty great, complete with successful Christmas Eve services, a delicious oyster omelet on Christmas morning, great presents from Santa (gold eyeliner! Just what I've always wanted! Santa reads Vogue, you know.), and dogsitting my sister's awesome dog for nine days. Hilarous photo of the dog in front of the Christmas tree will happen sometime after I get the file off of my phone and onto the computer.


I've had some pretty strong urges toward Startitis lately. While knitting the Cloud Socks, I also made a pidge in two days out of some lovely Blue Sky Alpaca Super-Bulky Hand Dyed wool that I bought at the Kaleidoscope Yarns Anniversary Sale this summer. Gorgeous slightly-irregular blue.

What is a pidge, you ask? I definitely had to ask. I'm glad I did, because "pidge" is now my new vocabulary word for the winter. I thought I knew about most items of clothing, but a pidge is something new. It may be a New England thing, I'm not yet sure. Anyway...

A pidge is kind of a cross between a cowl and a scarf. It's a rectangular, like a scarf, but so short that it has to be buttoned around your neck, close like a cowl would be (except that a cowl is cylindrical). My friend Aubrey-who-never-updates-her-blog-anymore introduced me to the concept, and now I am seeing pidges everywhere I go. LOVE the pidge! (Also, "pidge" is fun to say. Pidge pidge pidge!)

There is a kitty in this picture. He's yawning, which is pretty funny. Also, Husband likes to take pictures of ME rather than pictures of the hand-knits, so...yeah.

I modified the GC Cowl pattern (Rav link), and used some hand-turned buttons that I bought at the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival this fall. I crocheted little button loops so as not to have to figure out how to put a buttonhole inside the cable. I was knitting with super-bulky yarn on too-short metal needles, and that was irritating enough without trying to make vertical buttonholes inside a cable in addition.

Oooh, pretty buttons.

The finished pidge used two skeins plus about two yards of a third skein of the Blue Sky. It's seriously irritating to graft on a new skein just so you can finish the bind-off row.

I've wet-blocked the pidge once already, and it's still fairly curly. I may wet-block a second time and actually pin it a little bit stretched-out, or I may just let it go.

PIDGE!

YARN!

My college friend Kate was destashing, and I bought a box of yarn from her. The main scores were some ancient Lopi and some not-ancient Peace Fleece, both enough to make sweaters. Also, some random label-less chenille. There were some other items in there, some of which were awesome, and some of which will probably sit in the bottom of my stash forever. I don't understand these people who destash. But I will totally buy their yarn from them. Enjoy the unwrapping pictures!

HAT!

Husband actually asked me to make him a hat. Husband rarely expresses a great deal of interest in my knitting. He is supportive, yes. He indulges me in my yarn tourism whims. But he is a man more interested in functionality than aesthetics, and when I say things like "would you like me to knit you a hat?" he responds, "I already have a hat."

But when he lost his (store-bought) hat a few weeks ago, he asked me to make him another. I immediately dropped everything and knit him a hat. Ask, and ye shall be rewarded for asking.

When he lost his mittens at the mechanic, I found them a week later. I did not respond nearly so kindly to the lost mittens. And I took this tendency-toward-forgetfulness into account in my yarn choices for a hat, too. He definitely got the light brown wool-acrylic blend that was a "bonus gift" in a box of destashed yarn I got from a college friend this fall. I don't care if he loses a hat made from splitty 80's acrylic-blend cheap-o yarn.

Basic pattern:
Yarn is pretty basic worsted.
CO 120 sts on size 7 needles. PM and join to knit in the round.
k2, p2 rib for 3 inches -- enough for a nice brim to fold up over the ears
switch to St st - k2, k2tog around once. (90 sts.)
knit in St st for about 7 inches.
*k8, k2tog* ten times, keep decreasing at same places every round until you have 5 sts left.
Pull yarn through remaining 5 sts and weave in ends.

Seriously???

It took me something like six years to get over Second Sock Syndrome and knit two at a time.
...four weeks to knit the pair.
...two days to lose one of them!!!

It's too late, though. I've clearly gotten the bug, because I've already cast on for another pair. Sigh.


And I have faith that the lost shall be found. One of these days.

Cloud Socks

So I've been busy making socks. This two-at-a-time thing is genius. The first pair took me eight months (i.e., knit one, wait eight months, knit the second). The second pair took me four weeks, and that was not even knitting every day.

Here they are, my Cloud Socks:


Cast-on 20 stitches using Judy Becker's Magic Cast-On
Eventually switched to an uneven seed stitch (2x2), with some swaths of stockinette randomly in there for a "cloud effect" that you can't actually see at all.
Ann Budd's short-row heel from IK sometime in 2007? ("A better sock from the toe-up")

Looooove.

I don't hate making socks!

Once upon a time I made a sock. I was bored with the whole project, even during a two-day conference, and it took me a good eight months to make the second one. I convinced myself that I hate making socks. I didn't really enjoy wearing socks either, but that was fine because I lived in Georgia and wore heels just about every day anyway. And then I moved to Vermont, and accidentally made friends with every damn sock knitter in town. After almost a year of watching them make socks (and, also, of needing and wearing lots of socks), I decided to give the sock-knitting another try.

Turns out, I don't hate making socks after all! Here are the things that made me not hate knitting socks:

• I'm doing two at a time.
• I'm doing them on one needle (I just taught myself Magic Loop! ...from 2-At-A-Time Socks, thank you Treehugger for lending)
• I'm doing them toe-up.
• I learned the Judy Becker Magic Cast-On (because a provisional cast-on for a sock is stupid...a major point of doing it toe up is so you DON'T have to graft the toe together later!)(thank you, Cat Bordhi, for your excellent how-to video).

I knit about two inches per sock last night, and fell asleep thinking about stitch patterns I might use, and how to do them so they look pretty... I've totally converted, haven't I? Sometime I'll get around to posting pictures, but that involves taking pictures, which involves putting down the knitting needles. And I'm reluctant to do that right now.

Finished Objects

A few photos of finished objects... I have done quite a bit of knitting work lately, but have been remiss in posting here. It's been one heck of a month, hitting four major milestones in the span of eight days, a sudden trip home for a semi-surreal family funeral (not someone to whom I was close, I'm fine thank you, blah blah blah), and now I'm spending two blissful weeks doing as little actual work as possible, because I will not have this opportunity to recharge myself until after Christmas. And no, there will be no Christmas knitting this year, if I can help it.

This is my finished Dashing (for Ben). My sister took the photo -- since she's a magazine editor, she's especially good at setting up shots, even with my crappy cell phone camera. They turned out really well, and I'd knit this pattern again in a heartbeat, although probably with different yarn. Something a little softer/less scratchy than Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift. Mmmm, maybe a nice Blue Sky Alpaca and Silk???





Here's the finished Red Teddy Bear, for my sister's baby (who has been born! It's a boy! Photos to come later).

Sister loves the bear -- or, at least, she says she does -- and I'm hoping that Baby A. does too, eventually.


Doc the Cat wasn't so sure about the bear once I stitched on a face. He'd rather have the thing be a little less anthropomorphic, I guess. The face kind of freaked him out.

Poor kitty.



Currently on the needles: the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, and a yellow (slightly modified) version of the Red Teddy Bear, and a pair of thrummed baby mittens that I invented and did without writing down, so now I can't get the second one to match the first. Ah, experimenting.

Dashing (for Ben)

Ben is the janitor/groundskeeper for the Cathedral next door to my house. On the other side of our house is the Catholic charity house, and across the street is a Catholic school. Ben has a lot of work to do, and he is always outside doing some kind of maintenance work. And because our house was empty for several years before we bought it, Ben got in the habit of taking care of the front of our house, too. And even though we're here now, Ben has kept up that habit: shoveling our driveway in the summer (we share a driveway with the charity house, so he might as well), trimming our crabapple tree out front (he was doing all the others on the block, right?), mowing our front yard (he quickly realized that we don't have a lawnmower), etc. Man, Ben is a nice guy.

One snowy March day, I looked out my front window and saw Ben across the street, shoveling the school's walkways and NOT WEARING GLOVES. He needs access to his hands, of course, and can't be putting on and taking off mittens all the time. And I, toasty in my pajamas, working from home, drinking coffee with chocolate milk powder mixed in, watched Ben do his work. He was out there for hours. His poor hands must have been nearly frozen, and miserably chapped. And the lightbulb went on: he needs some Dashing fingerless mitts!

So summer has come and gone, it is now October, and although I wound the yarn for Ben's mitts a couple of months ago, I didn't get around to making them until this week. The air is starting to get chilly at night (perfect sleeping weather), and I want to finish the mitts before he need them -- wrap them nicely, write a little "thank you" note, and ... well, I haven't decided if I'm brave enough to walk down the street to his house and knock on his door and hand him the mitts in person, or if I'm going to just leave the package on his front porch one day. Either way, I've got to get these mitts done before winter gets here. I hope he uses them.