New look, new resolve

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I hope you will find the new blog design and layout cleaner and more inviting to read. I certainly feel encouraged to come over here and write more.

I’ve noticed, as I’m sure you have, a large number of year-end summary posts detailing the various accomplishments and industry of other knitters and crafters. “I should make one of those,” I thought briefly, before I was discouraged by a sorry lack of productivity to show for myself.

The funny thing is that, while I have excuses aplenty (full-time school, overwhelming personal life stuff, busying myself with NYC) it’s not that I haven’t been knitting. I actually knit quite often, but I am not finishing anything. Or if I do, I’ll leave out some tiny but super-important step, like weaving ends in a scarf or hat, or sewing buttons on a sweater.

I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s lazy and silly of me, and I’d like to finish these projects and put them to use. So the good news is, very soon I’ll have a pile of imminent FOs to show you. The bad news is, you’ll probably have to wait until 2012. But since that’s right around the corner, I’m calling it all good.

Coincident with turning over a new crafting leaf (since really, you would not believe how important crafts are to maintaining my sanity), I’m drumming up a new set of Crafting Resolutions. (You’ll note I said Crafting, not just Knitting, wink wink.)

2012 Crafting Resolutions

  • Gather together all nearly-finished projects and block, sew on buttons, weave in ends, or perform any finishing tasks to transform them to FOs.
  • Finish at least one project each month (including photographing it and posting it here).
  • Make long overdue gifts for my family: Cobblestone Pullover for my father, Cable-Down Raglan for my mother, Oiled Wool Hat and matching gloves for my brother.
  • Knit a sweater using the yarn I bought in Iceland (related: tell the internet all about my trip to Iceland).
  • Make at least one pillow from the number of pillow kits I obsessively accumulate.
  • Learn to use my sewing machine, and sew at least four projects.
  • Branch out with needlepoint, cross-stitch, crewel work, etc.
  • Do not buy any more yarn or crafting supplies until marked progress has been made on finishing some major projects.

These resolutions probably look pretty familiar to those of years past, and alas, they may be my perpetual crafting goals. This year, however, I have a plan, and I hope you will enjoy watching it unfold.

Varsity Kermit Sweater

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I have always loved Kermit the Frog. My buddy icon on the IMer, Twitter, and a handful of other places has always been Kermit. My Facebook “About Me” says, “I’ve derived a significant amount of my life philosophy from Kermit the Frog.” My sailboat is the Kermit:

If I were ever going to get a tattoo (I’m not) it would probably be very similar to this:

Quite some time ago, I got the hankering for a Kermit the Frog sweater. It’s hard to say if it began with the bright lime green yarn calling out from my stash or the iron-on Kermit patch I ordered impulsively one day. Little red buttons found their way into my craft basket when I was buying something unrelated, and so on.

I decided I wanted to use a contrasting color (which just arrived yesterday), and that I wanted a cardigan. At some point it hit me that the style I really wanted was a varsity sweater, in Kermit colors, with red buttons and the Kermit patch at the breast.

Suddenly I was doing the math on the Incredible, Custom-Fit Raglan Sweater, and now we have a Kermit-in-progress.

While this idea was aimlessly rattling around in my mind for years (basically since I learned how to knit), I now have a goal to finish this sweater in time to wear to the opening of the new Muppet movie at Thanksgiving. I may (no, will) look ridiculous in it, but I am a lifelong Varsity Muppet fan, and I’m proud of it! Soon, I will have the sweater to show it.

Making good on an old promise

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My big brother is one of my heroes, and I could go on and on about what an amazing human being he is, as well as his specific accomplishments in siblinghood – and to him, I do – but for the purposes of this project, I think it mostly suffices to know I love him dearly. I’ve also been promising him a hand-knit hat for an embarrassingly long time. I think most people don’t really need super-warm hand-knit hats, but my brother is a fishing boat captain, an avid hunter, and a general rugged outdoorsman who is frequently to be found in the woods or on the water in freezing, wet conditions, gleeful as could be.

My first attempts at hat-knitting for my brother were destined for failure, I can see on hindsight (I actually have a third attempt about 80% complete in my knitting basket, which doesn’t even fit me). I used a cotton blend yarn, needles that were too small, didn’t cast on enough stitches, and I attempted colorwork for the first time despite knowing it would cause additional tightness. I seem to come across the description “fat Irish head” a lot, and for my family, this description does seem particularly apt. My brother’s head is 24″ in circumference (I think mine is around 22″), yet I continued to knit standard “adult-sized” hat patterns, with all the gauge problems one could ask for, as if I would somehow stumble into a hat that fit. Spoiler alert: I did not.

I finally broke out the cone of oiled wool I had purchased years ago for a pair of shooting gloves for my father (still have to fix one thumb of those – jeez, I’m awful with gifts). I decided for a ribbed hat, to make it stretchier, and I found a really stylish and terrific pattern. Predictably, I had to go through a few failed attempts at this pattern, too, before I acknowledged that my yarn was thinner, my target size larger, and so on.

In a way, it’s good that all this fumbling delayed the finished hat because it gave me time to really think through this thing I was making. I wasn’t just gratuitously knitting my brother a hat – I wanted this to be the hat, the warmest, snuggliest thing he owned, which would keep his brilliant brain toasty even when it’s snowing on the ocean and remind him that his sister loves him every time he wears it. I started to think about the experience of wearing oiled wool next to the skin, and it honestly did not sound comfortable at all. I may joke about him being part Viking and a pirate, but my brother is also a stylish guy in his thirties, who has nice skin that he probably doesn’t want scraped raw with each wearing.

Fleece lining, I thought, will be the way to make the hat soft and comfortable, super duper warm, and give it structure. But boy do I hate sewing, and I didn’t even know where to begin with hat-lining. Here is where I blundered into what I consider one of the most brilliant ideas of my knitting career to date: to line a hat with fleece, buy a pre-made fleece hat and sew it in. Structure? Done. Seaming? None. Super weather-resistant, pill-resistant, washable fleece? In the bag.

The hat is blocking as we speak, but I’ve learned from my experiences. I’m going to make absolutely sure that the big Carhart hat I bought for a song (the Amazon comments of which extolled its virtues for fitting large-headed construction workers and outdoorsy men of the world) actually fits my brother before permanently sewing the hand-knit oiled wool part to it. I know the hat I’ve knit is finally big enough, and it’s the right style and feel, after all these years. It’s not his main birthday gift, or in fact being presented as one of this year’s gifts at all, since it was meant to be his gift way, way back in 2008, but I will be giving it to him when we celebrate our birthdays in a few weeks (mine is Nov 1, his Nov 3). I really hope he likes it!

Knitting all the time

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I think that being a knitter is similar to being an artist, or a scientist, or a chef, in that as you go about the day, you don’t really ever stop being what you are, yet it’s not the only thing that defines your existence. As I ride the ferry, I always notice the knit items people are wearing, examining their construction, the fit, the lace or cable pattern, and in the same way that I look at paintings as if I had a brush in my hand, I wonder how I would make this thing, what I might change about it, and so on.

But mentally knitting, obviously, isn’t the same thing as physically taking needles and yarn and producing something, which is why I’m so delighted to have stolen moments here and there to make progress on a bunch of projects, old and new.

First, look what’s off the needles and awaiting blocking…

This is my Upstairs shawl/wrap/scarf, with which I am utterly enamored. I will go on (and on) about this project in its own FO post, but I will say that the thought of blocking it and having raggedly, pointy, stretched-out edges broke me down, and I bought blocking wires. I look forward to seeing how they work out.

I stayed with my family in New Jersey through Hurricane Irene, and the several days we were without power gave me quite a head of steam on a project I haven’t mentioned before.

This is a summery laceweight shrug knit in seafoam stitch, and even though it will probably be a while (like, the next three seasons) before I get to wear it, I’m pretty enthused with what I think it will become.

I pretty much always have socks on the go (I will do a whole sock catch-up soon), but these had been abandoned a while ago in my knitting basket. I can’t really remember why, save for the tedium of working with bamboo needles, but once I started them back up again, I whipped through a heel and have been moving up the leg.

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I love this snowflake lace pattern, and I keep thinking about where else I might like to use it (probably a cardigan or shrug?) since it is that perfect blend of organic and geometric, deceptively simple, and really quite lovely when stretched and worn (saving that for the FO post, again, soon).

Now I didn’t knit this, but this is a spectacular alpaca hat my parents picked up for me during their vacation to Peru in August.

I am so smitten with its colors, style, and decadent, soft warmth that I’m actually willing the weather to get colder so I can wear it outside of my apartment. My father bought my mother an insanely gorgeous alpaca cardigan, which I have to remember to photograph the next time I visit.

Mmmm, alpaca….

And saving perhaps the best for last, I have finally started a new sweater for my mother, which is technically her Christmas gift from ohh… 2008? This is not her gift this year, but rather something I’m going to try to get done soon because I feel bad promising people knits and not following through (I’ve done this with both parents and my brother, so yeah, bad habit of mine).

You may recognize it as the Cable-Down Raglan, a pattern I’ve admired for a long, long while. And yes, I have the yarn (and now the skills) to make one for myself too.

I had started a different cabled sweater for my mom years ago, but the more FO photos I’ve seen on Ravelry, the less I think that sweater will be particularly flattering for her, and it would make us both feel terrible to spend all this time knitting some elaborate cabled sweater that she never wears it because it looks bad. I admitted that this hesitation was most of why I’d stalled out on her super-belated Christmas gift, and she was relieved that I didn’t plug ahead on a feckless project. When I showed her the Cable-Down Raglan and photos of women with similar shapes and how wonderful they looked in it, she became enthusiastic and encouraged me to go forward with this one instead.

True to form, she picked out another heathered purple yarn, and I must say, I’m pretty pleased with the way it’s coming along. I really hope she likes it!

So these are but a few of the projects keeping my hands busy lately. I often think that if I focused on just one project at a time, I could whip out the FOs left and right, and this may be a strategy I can employ once I get some of the long-hibernating WIPs out of my basket and off my needles. But in the meantime, we’re coming into autumn, or Knitter’s Paradise, and I’m happy to have my hands full of wool again.

Could it possibly be… I’m sewing on buttons??

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For as much as I love knitting (and wow, yeah, I do really love knitting), I sure hate finishing. I don’t mean “finishing” in the sense of completing a project (because that part is splendid) but the fiddly little tasks that stand in the way between binding off and having a garment, namely blocking, seaming, and perhaps most loathed of all, sewing on buttons or closures.

This isn’t a new topic – I have an embarrassing amount of projects that are completely knit, blocked, ends woven in, and ready to wear, save for, say, a hook and eye closure, or in an instance I haven’t mentioned, threading a ribbon through casings and tying a bow. Geez, that’s embarrassing to admit.

When the inspiration struck to finally sew buttons on a cropped cardigan that has (I must sheepishly admit) been living next to my sofa since I washed and blocked it months ago, I ran with it. The whole time, I wondered why I had put it off so long, seeing as it wasn’t exactly my favorite task in the world, but it was certainly far from the drudgery I’d worked it up to be in my mind.

Smokey, of course, has other thoughts about sewing on buttons. What is it with cats??

As I updated my Ravelry project page, I saw that it had been exactly a year to the day since I’d put this sweater aside with the intention to shrink it up a bit before weaving in the ends and sewing on the buttons. Let’s hope that I can now start wearing it and get it properly photographed before another year passes!

Thinking about lace

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This summer I am taking intensive courses in Organic Chemistry, which as you can imagine, takes up an enormous amount of time and energy. I’m doing things a lot differently than I did the last time I attempted summer classes, though, taking great care to be much more organized and live in a better balance. I’m making time to enjoy the gorgeous weather, to see friends and attend events in my beloved city, and to be a happier, calmer version of myself than I think I’ve ever been.

I draw almost every day in my sketchbook (on ferry rides to and from Manhattan, mostly). I notice it is making me much more attuned to organic shapes, curves, the forms and substance of nature, growth, and the magical little processes happening unassumingly all around us.


(Shadows like lace, on Water Street, in lower Manhattan)

I’m currently working on a second bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, a subject I find intensely inspiring and fascinating in elaborate and wonderful ways. A lot of the study of chemistry is recognizing patterns of behavior, which are based on the underlying structural tendencies of molecules that give rise to functionality. In essence, things act the way they do because they are what they are. I find that incredibly beautiful.

I also decided I’m going to minor in Mathematics, in part because my degree already requires all but one or two of the courses for the minor, but also because, like chemistry, I feel like math is this extraordinary way of unraveling the mysteries and intricacies of the universe, as a means to discover even more incredible ones.

The combination of these fields has me finding and accepting this system of order that governs the way things work, and it’s so effortless and elegant that it would be easy to miss entirely. Systems seek balance, but not homogeneity. Functions have inverses that aren’t opposites. And on and on, it’s just exquisite.

When I think about knitting, it’s a fantastic binary system. Knit or purl, basically, though I am inclined to also include yarn-overs, increases, and decreases as one’s knitting alphabet. Even these five elements seem totally manageable, if math can wrap itself around integers, fractions, positives/negatives, exponents, negative exponents, imaginary numbers, trigonometric functions, infinities… you get the idea.

When you put these elements together, you form much bigger and more ornate systems that have their own properties (similar to molecular functional groups comprised of only protons, neutrons, and electrons). Even very simple combinations (2 hydrogens and an oxygen, say) make a significant impact in a design. This is to say nothing of the properties of fibers, color, the way the yarn is spun, and so on and so forth, which expand in this seemingly infinite array of combinations and possibilities.

I’m knitting the Upstairs wrap/scarf, which I am finding extremely pleasurable. As a pattern, it demonstrates such satisfying elegance: each patterning section is constructed with a decrease, a yarn-over, and a combination of knit stitches that add up to 7. The yarn-overs move sequentially back and forth across the section, a perfectly-balanced little staircase. Can it get lovelier?

And yet the swooping, gorgeous shapes it creates as you knit are so much more evocative and organic than what are essentially zig-zagged lines. The delicate colors in this hand-painted yarn dance about in intriguing combinations that remind me of Monet’s paintings of sedge grass under rippling water. I am utterly, intrinsically enthralled with this project.

Vine Lace Vest: A Tale of Queue-Jumping and Impulsivity

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Ravelry does a funny thing to my sense of priority: it allows me the illusion of an organized, systematic approach to knitting via the queue. I pretend that I’ve planned out my projects, matched them with their yarns and sometimes even buttons or closures, and in the biggest delusion of all, I actually believe that I will follow through with this plan as imagined because I’ve put the projects in my queue that way.

Ha. Seriously, ha! I am the most fickle, mercurial person I know, prone to dramatic and swooping changes in opinion, career, romantic affiliation, and so forth, with little or no prior warning. Oh sure, I may have an inkling here or there with the major life events, but with art, or knitting? That is where my id runs rampant and I do whatever I want.

Parenthetically, how many lovely, sunny days have I had where I might have photographed a glimpse of this project? Might I have arranged it artfully on my sun-soaked windowsill and captured its most flattering attributes? No, no, I wait until the middle of the night in the depths of a rain-soaked week to decide now, now I must talk about this lace.

I think my project history has revealed no small love affair with vine lace. It suits my temperament so well, as it is the same repeat, offset by one stitch, alternating every other row. The lace itself feels nicely symmetrical, balancing the increases and decreases within a repeat that is just long enough to stay interesting but short enough that my hands can whip through it from memory. I am consistently delighted by the visual impact you can achieve from such elegant combinations of stitches, and I think it looks flowing, organic, and perfectly fabulous at any scale. I capital-L LOVE vine lace, and I doubt this fact will ever change, however much of it I knit.

I’d seen the Vine Lace Vest (PDF) before, as I subscribe to Classic Elite’s Web Letter (I recommend you do too – they have some great patterns). I’m not sure why it didn’t immediately grab me, seeing as it has almost all my favorite project components: vine lace, interesting but not overly tedious construction, large-gauge lace that moves fast without looking clunky, no buttons or zippers, and a versatile, very wearable garment in the end.

I am especially delighted to use stash yarn, this Simply Soft in a lovely, out of character dusty pinkish mauve color. I originally bought it for an ill-advised strapless top of some sort, which I knew, even as I queued it, I would probably not actually knit. I can’t explain why these very inexpensive skeins of acrylic wick at me the way they do, but I have a lot of them in my stash from my first years knitting, and I feel some sort of vendetta to turn them into garments I love. I have much nicer, vastly more expensive yarns hanging out in this glass-windowed antique secretary desk (I will, I promise, take a nice photograph of it sometime soon), but the shopping bags full of Simply Soft and Caron One Pound in the top of my closet weigh far more significantly on my mind.

When I started knitting, I dreamt about making shrugs and cutesy cropped cardigans, specifically to wear over sundresses and summery blouses. Impatient with my knitting progress and annoyed that I couldn’t wear the same hand knits day in and out (I suppose I could, but it would get dull), I’ve filled my closet with 3/4-sleeve cardigans and store-bought shrugs, but they never feel as special as the ones I’ve made.

Combining the prospects of a new short-sleeve open lace shrug-type garment that would be fast, fun, and easy to knit, with the ability to all but completely use two skeins of Simply Soft toward which I felt an odd and lingering guilt, the decision to cast on basically made itself. The Vine Lace Vest immediately jumped my entire queue of carefully thought-out and planned projects, the basket of in-progress knits that are all but complete, save for some buttons or seams, and every one of my intentions toward orderliness and self-control.

And I have not regretted it for an instant.

The Afterthought Heel

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For the most part, I’ve got a tried-and-true system for sock knitting: figure-8 cast-on, kf&b increases set in one stitch from the edges on every other row, short-row heel, 1×1 or 2×2 ribbing with stretchy bind-off. It makes satisfying, wonderfully-fitting socks that I can knit effortlessly.

I had a nagging feeling like I wanted to try other toes and heels, just to broaden my sock vocabulary, as it were, but any time I planned such a deviation from my formula, laziness or inconvenience would prevail, and I’d revert to what I knew.

A pair of rainbow stripe socks (heeee!!!) finally gave occasion for learning a new heel technique, as I didn’t want to interrupt the delightful, cheery striping sequence to do the toe-up short row heel I typically favor.

I found the most wonderful, incredible afterthought heel tutorial on Jobo Designs, which explained not only the technique, but the overall progress of working an afterthought heel.

I used the waste-yarn method described. I was knitting toe-up (as usual), so I knit the foot until I reached the point on my ankle where I would ordinarily begin my short-row heel. I then worked half the stitches (two needles’ worth when I was working on four) using waste yarn.

You then drop the waste yarn, move back to the beginning of that portion and knit the waste yarn with your working yarn (my rainbow). It made a happy little zip across the back of my sock, which looked like this on the inside:

(Bonus: I could clearly visualize how knitting forms fabrics from loops – magic!)

I knit up the leg and cuff to my desired length, bound off, and then came back to the heel. I think if I were a newer knitter, I might not have had the nerve to pull out my waste yarn zip, but it was really no trouble to gently remove it and pick up the stitches on each side of the gap it created.

Once again, I got to see the structure of knitted fabric from one row’s point of view, which kind of fascinated me.

After picking up all the stitches, I essentially worked a sock toe, but located on the heel. I fumbled for a second about how one works a top-down toe, since I almost never do them, when I remembered that it is literally the reverse of a toe-up toe: decrease stitches set in one stitch from each edge on every other row, until you have about 40% of your stitches (in my case I went to 12) in the middle. Then graft it shut with Kitchener stitch.

Is it the easiest, most awesome heel I’ve knit? Well no, not exactly, but it was still vastly more enjoyable than any top-down flapped heel I’ve worked. More to the point, the afterthought heel let me preserve my striping pattern on the body of the sock and choose the colors I wanted to insert at the heel.

Oh did you think I was going to give away how great it looks now?? No, no, I’m saving that for the FO pics!

Pre-FO: Seeking Closure

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So I knit the Diminishing Rib Cardigan quite some time ago. As in, I bound off last summer (August 10, to be further precise). But I haven’t really been able to decide how I wanted it to close, and I had this nagging feeling that it was a bit too big for me.

I did what I usually did: folded it up neatly in a pile in my closet and forgot all about it.

This weekend, my laundry situation got drastic to the point where I was eyeing up pajamas and wondering if I could layer them somehow to cover up the sleepy moons. I rummaged through the top of my closet and – oh happy day! – I found my cardigan!

As you can see, I wore it this weekend, to a Colin Hay concert with my mom (which was amazing!!!). As you can’t see, it still doesn’t have a closure. It is definitely too big to stay up on its own merits without looking saggy and misshapen. I asked my mom’s objective advice (before letting her know that if I didn’t like it, it would probably become hers), and she felt that fastening it at the waist (as I’d originally planned, many moons ago) would give it the right silhouette and take in the baggy areas under the arms that were displeasing me so.

Predictably, I already bought sets of hooks and eyes (and maybe even matching thread?) to create a nearly invisible waist closure. Also predictably, the thought of having to line things up and sew them on perfectly fills me with such drudgery that I may just wash this sweater and return it to the neat pile in my closet.

But… that color is so lovely, and I remember how badly I wanted this cardigan. I really ought to take the time to give it its proper closure. Soon, I hope.