Ruthless Knitting

In my leisure time this month, in addition to reading eight or nine books about a certain Detective Inspector Rebus, I’ve knit this much of a February Lady Sweater, which is the grown-up version of the February Baby Sweater by Elizabeth Zimmerman. At thirty-four weeks along, I continue to have an easy-peasy pregnancy, yet the lure of the couch is strong, and I’ve been helpless to resist it. Perhaps I’ll finish this sweater before the baby is born — I had intended to get some use out of it as a maternity garment. If not, I suppose it will still be there when I get back to it . . .

In other news, the falling leaves, windy weather, and gobs of candy on display at the grocery store all conspired to give me a wicked craving for some caramels, so today I made them.

I sprinkled salt on top, because salt always makes caramel even tastier. Here is the recipe, should you care to make your own:

Milk Caramels

2 c. sugar
1 c. light corn syrup
3 c. milk
1/4 c. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla

Preparation
Heat sugar with syrup in 1 c. milk. Stir until dissolved. Cook to 246–248º, or firm ball stage. Stir occasionally, slowly adding the second cup of milk. Repeat cooking process. Add remaining milk, butter, and salt. Cook to 246–248º (until a ball in cold water is firm as desired for firmness in caramels). Remove from heat; add vanilla.

Immediately pour into a buttered pan and grind salt on top if desired. Let cool before cutting into squares. Wrap squares in waxed paper if desired.

Notes
Be careful when adding milk to the hot caramel mixture, as it will boil up like crazy. Add just a little at a time and keep stirring to keep the temperature up.

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.

Pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmerman
Size: 6-9 mo?
Yarn: Craftspun Bluefaced Leicester Aran (100 percent wool); Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash DK (100 percent superwash merino wool)
Yardage: 300-350 yds
Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI; Catnip Yarns 
Needles: US 6 (4.0 mm) 24" circular needles
Gauge: 5.5 sts = 1" in garter stitch
Notes: I have been working a LOT lately, and I had to work last weekend, too, but I also needed to relax, and knitting this little jacket was, for whatever reason, the only thing I wanted to do when I had some time to take a break. Consequently, it knit up very quickly, and the process was fun. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this pattern, the important thing to know is that the whole sweater is knit in one piece, then folded up at the end and seamed across the top of the arms. Pre-folding, the knit piece of fabric looks truly bizarre, like a manta ray or something. As I followed the pattern directions, I was very interested in trying to work out what exactly I was knitting and how the jacket was going to take shape. Once I figured out where the arms were, it wasn’t too hard to understand the construction, though I still can’t quite imagine coming up with the pattern myself. Very clever, that Elizabeth Zimmerman.

I used the version of this pattern that appears in Zimmerman’s Knitting Workshop. The only trouble I had with it was figuring out how much yarn I would need: the pattern calls for 3 oz. of Shetland wool, which helped me not at all. (What weight is Shetland wool? Are we talking DK/sport, like Jamieson’s Shetland?) Luckily, I knew that the pattern was quite forgiving, so I decided to just dive in. I had 100 g (3.5 oz) of aran-weight yarn, which I figured might be on the heavy side, but I did get something approaching gauge with it, so off I went. It quickly became clear that 187 yds was not going to cut it, so I went in search of other yarns to use and came up with this bright blue yarn that I dyed last year. (I consider blue to be a gender-neutral color, by the way.) When I ran out of that, I used some undyed yarn of the same weight, which, thankfully, matched the undyed yarn that I started out with. It was all a bit of an adventure.

Some people churn out Baby Surprise Jacket after Baby Surprise Jacket. I can certainly see the appeal for using up leftovers, and it was the perfect pattern for me in the midst of a stressful time with work. In general, though, I don’t like to knit things more than once, and that much garter stitch would put me to sleep in normal conditions. It will be interesting to see if and when I decide to make another.

Next up, I’ve been working on a little cotton dress for my friend’s baby, who is due next week.

I’m actually knitting it from both ends at once, since my yarn supply is limited, and I want to make sure that I don’t run out. Progress has been fairly swift, so I’m hoping to have another little baby thing to show off early next week. The near-instant satisfaction of baby knitting is right up my alley these days.

I have (almost) finished the baby pants! I just have to put the elastic in the waistband. Aren’t they cute?

It’s good that they’re so very adorable, because they were a major pain to knit. Even though I was only responsible for 1.25 legs (Rebecca knit the entire seat and most of one leg), I have to be honest and say that I loathed the whole process nonetheless. It’s just not a good idea to knit with that many colors at once. I blame Dale of Norway, whose pattern this is. For the record, I did find the whole process more bearable on a single, short-cabled circular needle than on double-pointed needles.

One problem with knitting with five colors is that you have to carry all the other colors along, creating a rather thick and stiff seam at the inner leg. I tried a variety of things to make this seam as bulk-free as possible, but there’s really no way to carry four strands along without ending up with something that looks like this:

Grumperina had an interesting series of posts not too long ago (late March - early April 2008, to be exact) about how you can knit single-color stripes in spirals, thereby avoiding the pesky seam. I find that my mind can only barely comprehend how this technique would work, and I didn’t think I could start it mid-leg, so no dice this time around. Maybe I’ll try it in the future, though.

In any event, the pants came out cute, which I suppose is all that matters. They did bias rather severely in the wash for reasons totally unknown to me. Can you see in this picture how one leg of every stitch is more pronounced than the other?

Strangely, they didn’t look like this before I washed them, nor was there any difference between Rebecca’s stitches and mine — they all biased. I suppose it has something to do with the pants being made up of tubes. And with the way the yarn (Louet Gems Pearl) is plied. It’s not terribly noticeable, though, so I’m just ignoring it.

Meanwhile, I started a little baby jumper for Rebecca’s impending baby, but it wasn’t working out and I had to rip it back. I have another idea I want to try, but I needed to get away from the cotton for a while, so I decided to make a white Baby Surprise Jacket. I’ve never made one before, and the idea of white wool and garter stitch appealed. This is how far I was yesterday:

Though I have stared intently at the diagram, I still have no idea what portion of the jacket this represents. I think it may be part of both sleeves and also the back neck. Or not. We shall see.

There are three things in this picture that ought to catch your eye. First, I finished a sock. Isn’t it pretty? You can see the picot hem in the corner of the picture, and it has a garter-stitch short-row heel that I learned how to do from Lucy Neatby. It is an all-round champ of a sock.

Second, I have painted toenails. I got a pedicure on Thursday with my friend Rebecca as part of our ritual preparations for the birth of her second baby later this month. I chose toenail polish to go with the sock. It’s important that you know about Rebecca’s baby because now that I have finished the Secret Design Project (!), the knitting around here will be All Rebecca All the Time for a while. Not only do I have plans to knit a teensy garment for the baby, I also told Rebecca that I would finish all of her unfinished knitting projects, which will entail knitting two sleeves for a sweater and 1.25 legs for a pair of baby pants. She’s due in three weeks, so I have to get moving!

The third thing you should take note of is that the sun is shining and there are flowers in the background. Non-dead flowers. Though it did frost a little last night, it would seem that spring is more or less here to stay. Thank goodness. My mom had a bunch of annuals delivered to me, and I got them planted today. It’s nice to see some bright pinks and purples when I look out the windows.

I didn’t get a chance last week to report on the knitting classes that I took at the Midwest Masters. (I’ve been working a lot.) I came out of the experience glad that I had tried it, but also fairly sure that knitting classes just aren’t for me, for a couple of reasons. First, I learn very easily from books. I don’t think I have ever encountered a stitch in Barbara Walker’s treasuries that I wanted to knit but could not execute. This makes me willing to try pretty much anything, and that attitude has exposed me to a lot of information about knitting already. It seems that these knitterly qualities are more rare than I had realized. In my brioche stitch class, for example, I was the only one in the class who had already made something (a scarf) in brioche stitch. In Lucy Neatby’s class, I had already done several of the things on the agenda on my own at home, and we didn’t get to other techniques that I was more interested in because it took us too long to get through those techniques I’d already been exposed to.

This brings me to the second reason knitting classes may not be for me: I have always had trouble in art/craft classes with getting finished ahead of the pack. When I was in elementary school, the art teacher gave me a hard time for "rushing" through the projects each week, but I was never trying to rush — I just worked fast! In the knitting classes, I found it a little draining to have to wait for everyone to learn something before we could move on to the next thing. In Janet Szabo’s brioche class, we were pretty much able to work at our own pace on the different types of stitches, which was great, but then I ended up feeling that I could have just followed the directions at home, rather than sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a conference room. So, yeah. It was a good experience, the teachers did a great job, the conference was well-run, but I probably won’t do it again next year.

Have any of you had similar experiences? Or taken a class so phenomenal that you’d urge me to try again?