stash, knit, repeat

Thanks so much for all of the well-wishes, everyone. I hope Mr. D. arrives soon and healthy, too!

Until then, of course, life goes on. And since we’ve been enjoying a spell of really nice weather lately, complete with cooler evenings, my mind has turned to my sad, neglected knitting. In my fantasy world, the (pregnancy-caused) carpal tunnel is nonexistent, and I can quickly finish up my 2 wips.

Well, the CTS is sadly still with me, and nothing quick is happening here. I did manage to finish the first Rivendell, but I’m still only a few rows into the second. And although knitting has increased somewhat now that the Olympics are on, I’ve still got tons of yarn left for this Flower Basket Shawl. I’ve completed the called-for number of repeats of the main part of the shawl already, so it looks like I get to add an extra repeat or two to this lovely number.

What would I do, if these dragging wips were suddenly finished tomorrow? I’ve totally totally got the itch to knit sweaters again, folks. Perhaps a cardigan for myself, a nice cabled number for Jacob, maybe a sock yarn version of Tomten for the little one.

Until fantasy meets reality, I just need to keep telling myself: Soon, the swelling will go away. Soon, the air will have that gorgeous crisp fall taste. Soon, it will be time to wrap ourselves in wool once again. Soon.

Well, in case you’re wondering, a newborn isn’t the reason I’ve been away.

On the contrary, he seems plenty comfortable in there and I may well have to waddle like a manatee through a few more weeks.

There are worse things than a healthy-but-tardy baby, and we’ve been dealing with some of them, but I hope life will return to something vaguely resembling normalcy soon. Until then I hope you’re all well!

…because I clearly couldn’t actually finish anything to save my life, right now. I’m appalled to discover it’s been nearly three weeks, because I don’t even have one finished sock to show you folks, let alone two.

The new version of Rivendell does seem to be a keeper, though. (Yes, for the observant, I tweaked the pattern some.) I look forward to wearing them this fall, definitely. I’m sure my feet will have un-swelled enough by then.

I also started a shawl out of my Sundara fingering silky merino, because working on size 6 needles seems to be better for the carpal tunnel than working on the teeny dpns:

It’s flower basket, and I’m just loving the way it’s turning out. As always with Ms. Clark, the pattern is extraordinarily clear and produces a lovely result. The yarn doesn’t hurt either, of course.

And sewing doesn’t seem to be bothering me at all, so I’m almost done with my first solo quilting project.

The jury’s still out on it. I think, technically, it’s fine, but it’s far less to my taste than I imagined. I’m super-excited about the next quilting project, though. Isn’t that always the way with a new hobby? Initial excitement gives way to a bit of disappointment that it’s not as easy as you thought gives way to even bigger excitement about the next thing, because you’ve learned so much?

Or is that just me?

As if I needed another reason to be… well, less than excited about a summer pregnancy in Boston, my hands are so swollen that most days I can’t actually get my hands closed into a fist. Knitting is largely out of the question.

Lucky for me, the lovely wry punster thoughtfully suggested that I do some sharing!

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was six months into my first “real” job (at the company I work for still, actually). Jon and I were living in a lovely apartment in a pretty terrible town, and generally enjoying being grown-up.

The big news was that we were just starting to plan our wedding, having been engaged for a couple of years at that point. We planned the date around our photographer’s availability. She was a dear friend and former colleague of Jon’s (he worked in an independent photo lab during high school), and if you’re in the Maine area I would recommend her without reservations.

(Image copyright Leigh Kelly-Monroe and the Unforgettable Moment. Don’t copy it, hoser.) It’s a little bittersweet to post that photo, actually. We were so young! Not that we’re old farts now, of course… but life sure was different.

2) What are five things on my to-do list for today?

1. Play with Jacob at the awesome playground next to the preschool building before summer camp starts. Check.
2. Get an ultrasound to make sure the baby is simply large, not godzilla-sized. Check. (Everything’s fine.)
3. Pick up our first meat CSA at the farmer’s market this afternoon.
4. Manage to get organic fruit & veggie box off of the porch before it either (a) gets drowned by another round of freak thunderstorms or (b) all of the chard wilts into nothingness. (Mmmm. Chard.)
5. Watch the Sox get trounced again by the Rays. While trying to knit and keep my hand from going too numb. SIGH.

You know, writing that list, I’m realizing that none of those things would really have been possible in Monterey (though I loved Jacob’s Montessori school there with the heat of a thousand suns). Pregnant or no, depressing Sox games or no, I’m so happy to be back here.

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Right now?

*cough*

More generally, though, here’s a sampling.

Um, yeah. What can I say? I love good food. And vinegar. Don’t forget the vinegar.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

I’m far too pedantic for a question like this. But I’ll try not to be too irritating about my answer. I think, aside from changing careers and doing something like getting a degree part-time in food science or nutritional anthropology, our lives would look much the same. There’d be no mortgage for me or my fam, of course, and there’d probably be more travel. But I like our life, and wouldn’t want to change much about it.

So where would the money go? A foundation of some kind, I expect.

5) Places I have lived:

Small-town Maine

Claremont, CA. This was our dorm. I think the architecture is called “neo-brutalist”. Not the most photogenic place, I know. Scripps was much more beautiful.

Lowell, MA. Okay, okay. This is Ingonish, Nova Scotia. I never lived in Nova Scotia, but trust me. You’d rather look at this picture.

The Camberville area, MA. Yay! We’re back!

Monterey Peninsula, CA. Ties with Maine for the most beautiful place I’ve lived. Too bad my experience wasn’t great there.

6) Jobs I have had:

I’ve worked since I was 12, at one thing or another. So this is far from exhaustive. But it tells an interesting story about my life, I think.

1. Maid in a coastal Maine resort
2. Dairy Queen countergirl and snarker extraordinaire.
3. Mathematics research assistant
4. Information security engineer specializing in formal methods
5. System administrator
6. Manager of information security engineers and director of security research program
7. Mother

Cliche of the day: Guess which job is the most difficult?

Please do play along if the mood strikes you. I love reading stuff like this.

(Edited to add: I think I’m going to do my inbox a one-time favor and just publicly say thank you SO MUCH to everyone who commented on the Cleopatra Wrap. All of the wonderful compliments and well-wishes really meant a lot to me during these past gross weeks.)

Well! That was longer, more stressful, and more lacking in the internet department than we expected. Fortunately, we’re all here safe and sound. The boxes are far from gone, but I kind of have a craft room now!

Jacob is all settled for summer camp and preschool in the fall, I continue my part time work tomorrow after a nearly 1-month hiatus (thank goodness), and someday my stash will even have a home. Things are still hectic and disorganized, but hoo boy are they getting better rapidly.

Including my knitting! I’ve had a terrible time knitting-wise, these last few weeks. I’ve started and ripped no fewer than 4 different socks. Frustrated by pooling semi-solid/shaded/whatever you want to call it sock yarn, I bought some Cascade Heritage in a beautiful solid blue-gray for another try at Rivendell. I think I have a winner, this time.

Keep your fingers crossed for me?

It’s done! It’s done! The Cleopatra Wrap is done!

Pattern: Cleopatra Wrap from Sensual Knits, pattern by Miriam Felton

Yarn: Sundara Silk Lace, “Copper over Bamboo” (from the first Seasons Club)

Time Elapsed: Almost 4 months, but during most of that time the stole was sitting with just 7 rows done. Early pregnancy brain strikes. This is a fairly quick lace project, definitely under a month of actual knitting.

Notes/Modifications: The only way I really deviated from the pattern was that the Sundara is about 300 yards short of the recommended bamboo yarn. I still got a sizeable stole, about 20 inches x 73 inches, but I definitely could have blocked it wider if I hadn’t run out of yarn. I couldn’t think of a project better suited to this luscious stuff, though.

The stole is gossamer-light, the color is subtle and beautiful. I think words and pictures fail to adequately describe the finished product–you have to feel it. This stuff is toddler-steal-worthy.

He was very upset when I explained to him that the stole needed a bath, and he had to take it off.

The pattern is a nice one, even if it stretches on a little bit in the middle. The construction, which I’ve written about before, is totally groovy. You begin with a border, put the stitches on a spare needle, cast on the other border, and knit until you’re done. Then graft the two pieces together. On the one hand, it does get all of the most fun knitting out of the way first, which might contribute to the sloggy feeling of the middle. On the other hand, you waste no yarn. I think I had all of 2g left. And the borders match!

I think there’s the slightest of errors in the pattern–when you’re knitting the first border, the instructions say to complete the first chart, thus ending with a WS row. You end on a RS row coming from the other direction, and this means two pure knit rows together between the last WS row worked on the first piece and the graft row itself. Especially given the placement of the graft, this isn’t really noticeable, but I think it would look better if both pieces had ended on a RS row.

Obviously, this minor mistake (which I didn’t really think about until the piece was blocked) isn’t enough to hamper my enjoyment of the stole, which I love to pieces. And I finished it just in time for the first installment of the next round of Seasons Club, which just happens to start with more silk lace.

(It’s damn hard, I’ve found, to take decent self-portraits when hugely pregnant, but there are many more shots including more detail in flickr and the FO gallery here.)

I wish! But she does seem to be holding a nice monopoly on my knitting attention, these days.

My yarn is almost gone. After compulsive checking of the scale, I figure I can get through the current repeat and end on the appropriate row with a mere 2 grams left over. Woot! Fast progress (and the realization that I’m about to lose my blocking wires and surface for a few weeks) are spurring me on. I’m trying to complete the stole before leaving for Maine, and pushing off socks until after it’s finished. I think I can even finish the knitting tonight, although I may try the grafting tomorrow during daylight.

We all know that socks make the best travel knitting, and in my blog hiatus/move-in frenzy I’m hoping for a few pairs. Despite extremely tempting temptation,

I decided to stick with my original plan and knit the Rivendell socks in Sundara sock yarn.

The color is “glacier”, and I think it will be a perfect match for Rivendell. Being a huge Tolkein nerd from way back, I associate Rivendell more with the river itself than the autumnal hues that Peter Jackson chose. (Although don’t get me wrong, I love his translation to screen!) After that, I’m hoping to move on to the other Seasons Club sock yarn, mossy in particular. Tiennie’s beautiful Hedgerows really reminded me how much I love this color. The jury is still out on a pattern, though. Wouldn’t want to get too decisive.

I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. I probably could have finished the stole, if I hadn’t spent so much of my time focused on food. It’s an occupational hazard of the whole 7-months-pregnant thing, I suppose.

I love making fresh pasta. (This stuff was destined for my favorite tomato-cream sauce.)

I guess I don’t talk about it much here, but I actually love pretty much every kind of dough out there. Especially pie crust. I love pie crust so much that I can’t bear to throw scraps away, and bake them in the toaster oven sprinkled with cinnamon sugar instead.

The next few weeks will be pretty crazy for me, so in case I don’t make it back here until mid-June, here’s wishing you lots of yummy strawberry-rhubarb tarts!

Let’s just say that I’m not the world’s most patient person, generally.

Then there’s the pregnancy (officially reached: the bloated cranky stage), the upcoming move (omg omg 2.5 weeks omg omg), nervousness about a thousand things big and small that aren’t done yet (eek preschool waiting lists for crying out loud)…

…well, to nobody’s surprise, these things aren’t magically combining into a relaxed, summery, stress-free mood around here. It’s even starting to affect my knitting.

To be fair, it’s not only the stress that’s making me obsessively check my progress on the little kitchen scale. (40% done.) (Not that I’ve checked within the last hour of knitting time.) (Twice.) The stress plays a part, I’m sure, but so does the fabric slowwwly coming from my needles. In a perfect world, lace would not look like fiber vomit right up until the moment it’s pinned out. Since this world isn’t perfect, I occasionally get glimpses of texture that make me long for an FO.

The rest of the time, this gorgeous yarn looks like total crap. Seriously. I don’t know how it’s possible, either.

The knitting is going well, though. Now that I’m past the edging, the lace is so easy I can do it anywhere: Next to Jacob while he builds yet another train track, in front of the tv at night, talking with other knitters. It’s really nice to know that I can just knit and knit and knit, basically until I run out of yarn, without a care. Like toe-up socks on a larger scale. As a reminder, this is the construction allowing that:

Knit edging 1, knit edging 2 and then the body of the stole, graft. Also, remember what I said about the pinning giving the lace grace and fluidity? This is what I meant by that–the bottom edging isn’t pinned out at all–it’s what the stole looks like hanging from the needles. (More or less, anyway.) Oh, and the size difference there is lying more than a bit–the spare needle I have the first edging on is quite a bit longer and gives the stole more space to spread out.

Relaxing knitting though it is, and as impatient as I am to get the shawl done, I still feel like I need something else on the needles. Preferably socks.

I might make faster progress if I could make up my mind about the pattern. Or the yarn. At least I’ve narrowed the latter down to a particular brand?

Well, the party was this weekend, so now I can share!

Pattern: Nicky Epstein’s “Animal Pullovers (Elephant)”, from back issue of Knit It!

Yarn: Karabella Aurora 8, colors 14 and 201 (6 and 1 balls for the 4-year size)

Time Elapsed: 6 days, booyah

Notes/Modifications: The biggest change (other than skipping the Wool-Ease) was to make the edges seed stitch instead of rolled stockinette. I made most of the length measurements slightly shorter to accommodate this.

I also made the neckline a crewneck, since A. doesn’t like anything snug around his neck. I like the changes, and will probably do the same thing again when I make the duck version for Jacob. I’m not the biggest fan of intarsia, but sometimes the result is cute enough to be worth it.

I loved, loved, loved working with the Aurora and am already planning a sweater for myself in the stuff. It’s the softest merino ever, even softer than the Zara I used for my Jo Sharp cardi. Also, machine-washable! I put my swatch in the washer with a bunch of Jacob’s clothes on the “normal/fast” agitation setting (cold water), and it only showed a minimal difference from the sweater (which I’d soaked in Eucalan). I’m sure one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the gentle cycle and hand-washing.

But the best part about knitting this sweater was seeing A.’s reaction when he opened it. He got this huge grin, and immediately wanted to put it on despite rather warm temperatures. He refused to take it off for dinner yesterday, and when his mom (who generously took all of the modeled FO shots today) suggested he take it off after the photo-shoot was done, he refused again. Such obvious enjoyment is definitely the best part of knitting gifts, for me.

Final details round-up is in ravelry and the FO gallery here. And that’s it for secret knitting in these parts! Happy mother’s day to all who celebrate–I’m off to snuggle with my own munchkin.