Ruthless Knitting

Well, hello there. It’s been a while. Some people seem to be easily able to manage wrangling a baby, working, and continuing to knit, but apparently I am not one of them. No matter. James is thirteen months old now, and I’m finding a little bit of time here and there to knit. And for almost the first time since he was born, this morning I am finding a little bit of time to blog about knitting. Let’s resume, shall we?

Over the past thirteen months, I’ve had an opportunity to make some first-hand observations about baby knitting–which baby knits are worth the effort and which aren’t, what comes in handy and what doesn’t. Here’s my list.

(1) Hats are great. A newborn, particularly one born in the winter, needs quite a few hats (at about 14-15″ circumference), and they are quick to knit and adorable to behold. I made half a dozen before James was born, used and enjoyed them all, and then handed them down to a friend. These two were my favorites.

For an older baby, hats are still awesome. If you make them big enough (say, 16-17 inches around), they’ll fit for a large part of the first year. Lightweight, machine-washable hats come in handy for spring, fall, and winter. I got a lot of use out of these two, the first of which I actually knit for my nephew but got back as a hand-me-down.

(2) Blankets are barely worth the effort. I used the Carseat Blankets that I made for James quite a bit, both to wrap him up as a newborn and to tuck around him in the carseat, but I found that if I wanted a full-size blanket, I wanted one made of washable fabric, usually to lay down on the floor underneath him. I think in the future I’ll stick to teensy blankets for new moms.

(3) If you’re going to make a sweater, make a V-neck cardigan or a vest out of lightweight yarn. The sweater that I’ve put on him the most is one that I knit out of wool sock yarn. Not only does it make him look like an adorable old man, but it’s also very functional. It makes a good second layer, and the V-neck and short, wide sleeves keep the sweater out of his way. It doubles as a jacket in the spring and fall.

I haven’t actually knit James any sweater vests, but I did recently buy one to use for layering. We keep our house at 65 degrees during the day, and he usually needs something on over his long sleeves and pants to keep his hands warm. A full-size sweater or hoodie sometimes seems like too much, and that’s when I want the vest.

(4) Pants are adorable and warm. My mom knit James some brown wool pants in a pretty heavy yarn (worsted, I think, but maybe DK), and I put them on him a lot. They’re warm, soft, and seem comfortable. I wouldn’t want a whole wardrobe of wool pants for him, but I like having the option. I think the pattern she used is from Chic Knits for Stylish Babies.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Your mileage may vary. Hope to be back soon, posting about one of my works in progress!

It seems that every time I go out in public, someone asks me when the baby is due (Answer: Thanksgiving), if we know whether it’s a boy or a girl (No), if we’re going to find out (No), and if we have a hunch (No). Then they usually tell me that I’m having a boy.

If so, he’s going to miss out on a lot of cute knitwear. When my mom came to visit, I asked her to bring some of the knitted things my grandmother made for me. These are the ones that ought to fit a little baby.

(By the way, my camera is back from Nikon. It had a mysterious, intermittent problem that may be fixed or may just be waiting to recur when I least expect it. Meanwhile, I am ever so happy to have it back.)

This green sweater and bonnet set has a beautiful stockinette petal motif on a garter-stitch yoke. I’m not sure what stitch the body uses. Any guesses?

This one was knit in a heavier yarn, perhaps a worsted. Lovely details.

This one is my favorite, I think, for its whimsical pompom placement and the very smart combination of stitch patterns with yarn choice and overall shape. Mom says Leona used to wear it a lot. It has a little hole that I will have to try to darn.

And if I do have a boy, perhaps he can wear this one — though I think that Grandma actually made it for one of my dolls, so we’ll see. (Sorry, the red is so bright that it’s sort of washed out. I suppose I should have corrected for that.)

There is also an absolutely gorgeous newborn-sized cardigan and bonnet that has several tiny holes in it. I think it’s too fragile to use for this baby, but if I were feeling ambitious I would recreate the pattern from scratch. It uses fingering-weight yarn and has beautiful trinity-stitch edgings (or daisy stitch?) against a stockinette background. Since my ambition is somewhat lacking of late, I have packed it away for now, to be reconsidered in a few years.

Anyone know how to get the smell of mothballs out of clothes? My mom already washed everything with Kookaburra wool wash, so that alone won’t do it, and I don’t want to cover up one smell with another by using a stronger-scented product. I suspect that at least a few of these sweaters are acrylic and may tolerate machine washing, so that’s a possibility. I could also try hanging them up outside in the crisp October air. Other ideas?

Glass art, as I mentioned earlier this year, is my father’s hobby. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a website yet, but I will show you his most recent bowl (without permission — sorry Dad!) so you can be wowed by his skills. He made this with leftovers, folks. This is a scrap bowl.

As you can imagine, I would be remiss as a daughter if I didn’t take advantage of his skills to make something out of glass pretty much whenever I go to visit. (Also, he spent much of his free time for a year making me a totally amazing and perfect lamp for my kitchen. The scrap bowl above is made of scraps from one of the failed lamps.) So while I was out in Oregon in June, I made this drop-ring vase:

This is a fused glass project, meaning that it was melted into this shape in a kiln. The process involved layering three rectangles of glass — clear on the bottom, then light gray, then blue — and using long, skinny rods of glass called "stringer" on the top to make a grid pattern. I superglued the stringer onto the blue glass; superglue burns off in the kiln. Between the bottom clear layer and the gray layer, I placed white and mint green stringer in an abstract pattern and then, on the spur of the moment, sprinkled on some little pieces of red stringer that I had left over from the top.

With that done, I stacked my pile of glass rectangles inside the kiln on top of a clay form that my father had made with a hole in the middle of it. I programmed the kiln according to his instructions, pressed "start," and went inside to have lunch.

By dinnertime, the glass had heated up enough that it had started to melt. Since it was stacked on top of something with a hole in the middle of it, it melted down through the hole toward the bottom of the kiln. (This is the "drop" in any "drop-ring vase.") At this stage, we opened the kiln door pretty regularly to have a look at the glass’s progress. Once the dropping glass reached the floor of the kiln and began to pool, we let it form a nice foot and then kept the door open long enough to rapidly cool the kiln down to a temperature below the melting point. Then we closed the door and let the glass "anneal" (which has something to do with all the molecules lining up into their new configuration — I’m a bit fuzzy on this) and cool down overnight. By the morning, it was ready for inspection.

You can see in this last picture and the one above how the stringer that dropped through the hole elongated and made pretty vertical lines on the inside of the vase. On the outside, the gray glass turned silvery in the foot, and the red bits of stringer that I threw in on a whim made an interesting, confetti-like pattern. The stringer that I used on the underside was not as successful, as the color contrast wasn’t really sufficient for it to show up much.

Once the vase had cooled down, there was a lot of "cold working" to do, which basically entails endless grinding and polishing of the glass edge so that it looks shiny and smooth, as if it had been born that way. I learned that I have very little patience for cold working.

People tend to talk about knitting as if it is complicated and fraught with the potential for failure. While it is true that there are plenty of things one can get wrong while knitting, particularly when knitting a garment, it is also usually the case that, in the face of such a failure, one can rip it all out and start over without losing anything but one’s time. Fused glass is not nearly so forgiving a medium. I cannot tell you how many times my dad has spent hours and hours cutting glass and otherwise sweating over a project, only to have it bubble disastrously or crack or just somehow go to hell in the kiln. Glass is a harsh mistress. But it also, like knitting, has the potential to reward your careful planning with results that are lovely in ways that realize your mind’s eye vision at the same time that they surprise you completely.

What I’m trying to say is that I suspect my dad likes working with glass for many of the same reasons that I like working with yarn. Huh. Go figure.

So, while this piece looks a little more like something Spiderman would use to decorate his home than I had intended it to, I am nonetheless rather taken with it. Thanks, Dad, for letting me dabble in your craft.

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.

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.

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?

The Kinari cardigan has reached a tough stage. Progress seems slow, the sweater is all scrunched up on the needles, and I’m having periods of doubt about some of my decisions. Will it be too wide at the bottom? I don’t own anything swingy, maybe for good reason. Will the bright white of the buttons look okay on the unbleached white of the sweater?

I suspect that many sweater projects are abandoned at this stage, when the fantasy that propels you through the first half of the knitting starts to fade, papered over with doubts. The rows are long now, and the edges all curl under, and it’s hard to envision just how the final product will work out.

It’s been my experience that art in general hardly ever works out just the way I imagine it will. But it often works out in a different way than I could have imagined — a way that is just as good, once I’ve managed to let go of the image of the old thing and to love the new thing as it is.

So I press on, one long row at a time, because that’s the only way to find out what this sweater will be when it’s finished.

The Middlebury cardigan is done but for the buttons. It’s a great relief to have it totally off the needles, as it seems like I’ve been knitting it for a long time (though it’s apparently only been since September). I’m immensely pleased with how it turned out. I’ll do a full finished object rundown with pictures as soon as my buttons arrive and I sew them on.

This has been one of those weeks in which I spent several days wanting to cast on something new RIGHT NOW. Indeed, I actually cast on a number of different things, but I ripped all of them back out about twenty minutes later. It’s become clear to me that my frantic-wish-for-new-knitting moods have nothing to do with knitting and everything to do with my mental health (which, have no fear, is excellent — but we all have our bad days). The weather this week was rather relentlessly bleak, and it made me feel dissatisfied and easily distracted. On Wednesday, the rain cleared up, so I rode my bike to the arboretum, ran hard for six miles, and rode home. That made me feel better, and my knitting woes evaporated.

Now that Middlebury is done, I’ve happily resumed knitting my Red Herring socks.

I made the first one in May, intending to give it to my mother for her birthday, but it turned out to be too small for her and perfect for me. Since I had other priorities at the time — namely, starting and finishing the Oriel Lace Socks for her — I never did get around to knitting the second Red Herring, which was a shame, since I did love the first one dearly.

What’s great about returning to the socks at this point is that (a) it’s an all-new pattern, since I’ve pretty much forgotten everything about knitting the first one, (b) it allows me to check off the only substantial project on my list of unfinished objects, and (c) it goes so quickly! At some point during the summer, I got the ribbing cast on for the second sock and knit a few pattern repeats. At a meeting on Tuesday, I knit a few more pattern repeats. That meant that when I turned to the sock last night, I had finished the seventh pattern repeat in no time flat, leaving only four more for today. I did three while having my morning tea, so once I do the last one, I’m on to the foot and the smooth sailing of plain stockinette. Whee!

Throughout the process of working on this sock, I’ve been using my Go Knit Pouch (link goes to Scout’s Swag, where they can be ogled and purchased) to carry the sock around and knit from. Just last night, I started suspending the pouch from the arm of my knitting chair instead of dropping it unceremoniously on the floor at my feet. This feels like a great leap forward in pouch usage. I love this bag — it keeps everything neat and tangle-free while I’m knitting. I think I shall get a bigger one for my sweater projects.

I have to hold off on my promised good news until next week. Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

I wanted to show you progress pictures on Frances today, because I think it’s important that I not refrain from picture taking until the sweater is done and then say, “Here it is!” When I do that, it makes it seem as though I produced the sweater with no effort, when in fact I am madly knitting, knitting, knitting on it like Madame Defarge. Unfortunately, all of the pictures I took this morning came out blurry, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: much knitting is taking place on Frances, and she now has two sleeves and a body all the way down to the waist. I think it will take me about a week to finish the remaining bit of the body and weave in ends. I’m thrilled with how she looks so far.

Meanwhile, Zigzag Stitch has an enjoyable post today about her “best ever” handknit, and she asks at the end, “What’s your best ever?” While I agree with her that there are many different criteria with which one can answer this question, by her own criteria, I have a hands-down winner: my felted slippers.

My felted slippers, as you can see, are rather loud. These days, they are also rather ugly, misshapen things, with blue fibers mashed into the sides of the soles from our living room carpet. And they are starting to fall apart, to boot: these slippers have a double-thickness sole, and I’ve worn a hole straight through the outer sole on each slipper and am coming alarmingly close to wearing a hole in the inner sole as well. They are my best ever handknit simply because I wear them every night and every morning and I have done so for the last two years (nearly) since I made them. They have perfectly molded to the shape of my feet, they’re cushy, and they keep my toes warm.

The pattern is the ever-popular Fiber Trends Felt Clogs pattern (link takes you to one of many places where it can be purchased), with the bumper left off. I need to make a new pair soon so that I won’t have to go into mourning when these give out on me. I’m thinking they should be just the same, only less outrageous: blue soles would be nice, to go with the carpet fibers that will quickly get mashed in, and brown tops to keep them a bit more sophisticated than the first pair, yet also better able to disguise the inevitable dirt build-up.

What’s your best ever?

Since I last posted, I’ve been finishing up all sorts of knitting projects, some long-term and some instant gratification, but I haven’t been able to blog about them because my computer died and I’m using my old laptop. Okay, technically, nothing is stopping me from blogging, but everything’s harder on this old computer, and I am too lazy to import pictures and so on. I’m supposed to get my computer back today, and then I can play catch-up.

In the meantime, I will answer the “Eight Random Things about Me” meme that Gryphon tagged me for. I think that Mel tagged me for it a few months ago, but I was too lazy to do it. Also, I kept thinking it was “Eight Weird Things about Me,” and I couldn’t think of anything weird about myself. (I told David that, and he thought it was funny. He did not have any trouble coming up with weird things about me.) But then I thought of several items that are both weird (by some standards) and random, which I will list for your edification. There’s supposed to be a baby picture, too, according to Gryphon’s modified rules, but I don’t have any handy. I’ll try to remember to add one after I get my computer back.

Edited to add: Here’s that baby picture! I like this one because I am so obviously pouting. And if someone was taking my picture, the pouting was just as obviously not being taken very seriously. I am about two and a half here.

1. I have two TVs, but neither of them has any channels hooked up — no cable, no antenna, no reception. At least, I assume that they have no reception; I’ve never tried to receive anything on them, so I can’t be sure. There’s one TV in the bedroom, which we use at night to watch movies and shows we get through Netflix (currently season 3 of Deadwood), and there’s another TV on the wall in the basement, which entertains us when we’re on the treadmill. Otherwise, we don’t watch TV.

2. I exercise five or six times a week, and it’s one of my favorite things to do. I run, do yoga, walk and hike, ride my road bike, ride my mountain bike, ski, snowshoe, do indoor climbing, and lift weights. For the vast majority of my life, I considered myself to be “not athletic” because of my mediocrity at all the team sports and gym class games that constitute athletics in the public schools. I think it’s practically a crime that we introduce children to exercise by having them do competitive sports, which only a small fraction will ever excel in, and which teach many children, including myself, much more about what it feels like to fail and be humiliated repeatedly than they do about “cooperation” and “healthy competition.”

3. I’m a vegetarian, and I cook just about everything David and I eat from scratch. When I go to the grocery store, I’m usually quietly appalled at the groceries other people are buying. No vegetables! Hamburger Helper! Gallons of strawberry-flavored milk! Cases and cases of soda! Pounds and pounds of red meat! Frozen meals! Yikes!

4. Despite the impression items 1-3 above almost certainly give, I’m not an evangelist for my way of life. If you watch TV, don’t exercise, and eat processed food for every meal, I don’t care. Really.

5. I don’t do (and am not interested in doing) any craft except knitting.

6. I am the vice-president of the Board of Directors of the Brown County Historical Society.

7. I don’t understand and have never understood why people like cats so much. I have nothing against cats, really — they seem fine. I just don’t get their appeal.

8. I only blow-dry my hair about twice a year, and I don’t dye it, even though it is just plain brown. Sometimes I get the impression that this puts me in a very small minority of American women. Why am I the only person I ever seem to encounter in public with wet hair?