Knitters-Knitters

The First Three Notes

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
when you read you begin with a, b, c
when you sing you begin with do re mi

The women in my life have been having babies at an astounding rate, and this is giving me a chance to make many baby blankets. They may be my favorite thing to knit because almost anything goes. For example, I really wanted to knit a blanket using the discontinued yarn Jo Sharp Classic DK wool. The problem is, it's not a very soft yarn.

I prefer to knit yarns that have a little "bite" to them, but that's not necessarily what a baby wants to feel next to his skin.

So we introduce the lining, in this case knit from Dale of Norway Harlequin.

I like a firm edge, and in my experience, an older baby likes to chew on a nice, dense piece of knitting. The mitered borders are knit from St. Denis Nordique in pale yellow.

Right now I'm keeping the live stitches on waste yarn, but will eventually add a little red stripe of reverse stockinette in Dale of Norway Heilo to each border. When I sew the borders down, the reverse stockinette will look like raised piping. One side is complete:

If you've never knit a baby blanket before and are now daunted by the process I've described, don't worry. A baby blanket does not require mitered edges, piping, lining, or the use of discontinued wool. The baby and mom will still feel loved without them. I've made many respectable blankets -- for my own children -- using none of these added details.

If you knit baby blankets regularly, you may be a bit Concerned. Concerned as if you've come across me sitting in the middle of a five-acre lot, trying to remove dandelions one by one with that tool that looks like a forked screwdriver.

This blanket? It's not really about the baby. It's about the comfort about going back to basic steps, back to the beginning. Back to do re mi. It's about focusing on the foreground and ignoring the Big Picture, at least for the time being.

Today when I was watching Live! with Kelly, I correctly answered the daily trivia question (which is always based on the previous day's show). The question was, What was the working title of the Beatles hit, "Yesterday?"

Scrambled eggs! I thought to myself, and then said it aloud because we all know it doesn't count if you just think it. Scrambled eggs! I only planned to say the words, but apparently I shouted. Pam Spaniel, lying on the spine of the couch behind me, was so startled that she yelped and whacked me on the top of my head with her paw.

Yes, I'm still Disappointed. But I can knit and I can purl, and I can enjoy the tiny victory of getting a trivia question right.

There's another small pleasure I've been enjoying. As background: one of my children is a Reluctant Reader (We'll just call this child RR). Part of RR's homework is reading for enjoyment for at least twenty minutes a day, regardless of other homework. RR had been reading aloud to me in the afternoons when Olive was out with Beata, but we had gotten out of the habit during the winter. We are back on track, and now that it's warm, we do our reading outside.

I was delighted when RR approved of my most recent suggestion: These Happy Golden Years. It's my favorite book in the Little House series, but when I read it for the first time I was too young to appreciate it as a love story. I didn't understand what it meant that Almanzo was willing to drive his cutter twenty-four miles every Friday and Sunday, just so Laura could spend the weekends with her family instead of the depressing trio she boarded with during her weeks of teaching.

If you know the novel you remember that halfway into the very coldest drive, Almanzo stops the horses and gets out of the cutter. I was gratified to hear RR begin reading faster at this point, as curious as Laura to find out why Almanzo would stop when it was so cold that they were in real danger of freezing to death:

...Dimly through the black veil she saw him going to their drooping heads, and she heard him say, "Just a minute, Lady," as he laid his mittened hands on Prince's nose. After a moment he took his hands away and Prince tossed his head high and shook music from his bells. Quickly Almanzo did the same thing to Lady's nose, and she too, tossed up her head. Almanzo tucked himself into the cutter and they sped on...

I stopped RR and asked, "What does this tell you about Almanzo?"

RR thought a moment and said, "That he is very kind."

If you wanted to (which I didn't) you could argue that Almanzo was just being practical. No one gets home alive if the horses' noses freeze over and they can't breathe. But of course, nothing Almanzo has done that day has been practical: not taking the cutter out to the Brewster house, not retrieving Laura, and not rejecting the offer to spend the night at the Brewster's and set out fresh the next morning. Almanzo's travel that Friday was especially impractical because Laura had told him the week before that he should stop giving her rides if he was assuming that there was something in it for him.

Laura taught the children of that settlement for eight weeks, and every Friday, Almanzo showed up at the schoolhouse to drive her the twelve miles to her parents' home. Almanzo never did address her protestations, nor did he defend himself from her suggestion that he expected something in return for transport. If his feelings were hurt by her rudeness, he didn't mention it.

Almanzo just kept showing up. And as it turned out, there was something in it for him.

Yesterday was LB and my wedding anniversary. We have been married for nineteen years.

The Same - The Same

The Beautiful Changes

- Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

***

I have a poetry repertoire of around five: there's Prufrock, The Art of Losing, I Move to Keep Things Whole, The Soul Selects Her Own Society, and the poem transcribed above. These poems can be applied to just about any situation I may find myself in, and to learn any more poems would overflow the very small section of my brain relegated to poetry. To put it another way, this is all I know on earth, and all I need to know.

Ye already know that I dislike change. My need for things to be the same-the same borders on neurosis, and I blame this in large part to face-blindness and place-blindness.

For example: When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a dorm. My dorm was at the bottom of a hill, and if you went to the top of that hill and turned left, you were on campus. Turning right would lead you into Collegetown, where there was a very handy convenience store. This store had an ice cream counter in the front where they sold Purity ice cream, which I adored. Now, my sophomore year, I lived in a Collegetown apartment with five other young ladies. As luck would have it, our apartment was also very near a convenience store where, oddly enough, they also had a Purity ice cream counter in the front of the store.

You see where this is headed, don't you?

I'm not sure how many trips I made to the convenience store to get ice cream during my sophomore year before I realized that it was the same convenience store, simply approached from a different angle.

At any rate, change frightens and confuses me. So when I'm faced with it, I think of this Richard Wilbur poem and it makes change slightly more bearable. Those roses? Not all mine to begin with. This house? Not mine, either. We are all of us tenants, really, but to put it in Orwellian terms -- some of us are more tenant than others.

Disliking change isn't such a bad thing. When I learn that something I care about is going to stay the same, I'm that much more grateful.

Leah and Larry don't want their house back for at least another year: no packing and moving for the Sullivans this summer! Dieter and his family are staying in the Chicago house -- no need to seach for new renters.

Olive just had her IEP and three-year review at Keshet. It went very well, even though the occupational therapist changed her seat at the beginning of the meeting, thus sending me into a state of confusion that temporarily erased my brain.

Olive will be able to return next year. (Private school is expensive, and our ability to keep her at Keshet is something we can never take for granted). All of this sameness-sameness is excellent news, because if there's anyone who likes change less than I do, it's my little Miss O.

I did indeed finish my rainbow shawl in time for teacher appreciation week!

This is the "North Sea Shawl" from Folk Shawls by Cheryl Oberle. My main change was to cast on invisibly beginning with the center panel, then knit both ends starting from the center out instead of from the shawl edges.

This way I avoided any grafting, and the pattern points towards the center of the shawl instead of all going in one direction.More info and the chance to pepper me with hearts here:

This Isn't Really About Knitting

A few days ago I began a thank-you shawl for yet another essential member of Team Olive. 

It occurred to me that for the past several years, the bulk of my knitting has been thank-you gifts for members of Team Olive, ranging from Keshet ladies to Teacher Em, Magical Realism Maria, and beyond.  They have also been my most rewarding projects and for a very practical reason: I know that any hand-knit gift I give to someone who works in Special Education is going to "land."  The very career choice of Special Education implies an appreciation for hard-won gains and the small victories that come after long periods of time in which nothing seems to progress.  The recipient understands that I am trying to show my gratitude with a physical manifestation of time and patience, and the recipient knows the value of time and patience.

Years ago I knit a blanket for a close friend of mine who was having a new baby.  I used a hand-spun, hand-dyed angora and merino blend, which is a lot like saying I knit the blanket out of twenty-dollar bills.  It was beautiful: the Elizabeth Zimmermann garter stitch pattern where you knit four triangles into a square and then graft the beginning to the end.  I also knit the baby a matching garter stitch surplice: another EZ pattern, the one with a row of eyelet buttonholes along the bottom of the sweater so that the button can be moved to new holes as the baby grows.

My friend made the appropriate oohing and ahhing sounds when I gave her the blanket and surplice at the hospital, but then I went to visit her and the baby at her home a few weeks later.  She said to me, "The funniest thing happened to that blanket you made!"  She went to her baby's closet and brought out what was now a potholder.  "I'd forgotten you said it needed to be hand-washed.  I don't suppose there's any way to fix that."

I didn't think it was all that funny.  Accidents happen, but why would she make a point of telling me about it?  And why would she present the accident as something amusing? 

Then she said, "We were at the park last week and I saw a little boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt with one big pocket in the front.  His mom told me her mother had knit it.  Could I commission you to make a sweatshirt like that, but in washable yarn so I can toss it in the machine and forget about it?  What would something like that cost?"

I said, "One million dollars."  I resisted the temptation to ask the location of the matching surplice so that I could confiscate it, or at the very least, contact Hand-Knit Garment Rescue Services to step in.

After I left her house, I sat in my car for a minute and thought about what had just happened.  Her behavior and her ensuing request felt like such a slam that it could not have been what she had intended.  It was simply too unkind to be deliberate. 

Then I remembered an incident that had happened between us years earlier: I was knitting and my friend asked, "When you're all done, doesn't it depress you to think of how many times you've made that same loop sequence (here she paused and pantomimed a slow and dramatic series of hand gestures which any knitter could see would not result in a stitch), and how you've touched every inch of that yarn?"

Another incident: not long prior to baby's birth, my friend had asked me what I was getting LB for Christmas.  I said I was knitting him a sweater, and she said, "It's good you can do that, because then you don't have to feel like you're just buying him a present with his own money."

I'd like to say I had an epiphany right then in the car: our friendship was over, and had been for some time.  But the only epiphany I had was that I probably shouldn't give her any more hand-knit gifts.

Several years later this friend had another baby.  I went online to a children's clothing boutique where I pointed and clicked.  Then I clicked a little extra for gift wrapping, and put my friend's address on the order form so that the gift would be mailed to her house directly from the shop with as little effort on my part as humanly possible.  Hah!  That'll show her!

My friend was absolutely thrilled with the gift.  It would not be exaggerating to say she was bowled over.  In fact, in all our years of friendship I don't think I've ever given her a gift that hit the spot the way that little outfit did.  Right or wrong, there are people who need to be able to ascribe a dollar value to the gift in order to appreciate it. There are also people who -- don't laugh, fellow knitters, I'm being serious here -- are under the erroneous impression that it is cheaper to knit a blanket than it is to buy one.

It wasn't until Olive was six or seven years old that I understood we were not friends anymore.  We would often talk on the phone about our children.  I liked hearing about hers and she seemed interested in mine, but I found myself unwilling to talk about Olive and her achievements.  When I was on the phone with my friend, even the most exciting passages in the Sacred Notebook sounded hollow and inconsequential.  Olive's progress, to the reluctant observer, could look like the repitition of a series of tedious loops.  And if said observer did not have the patience to watch and listen for long, her progress would not be visible at all.  

Some friendships end dramatically and some fade away with no animosity, but this friendship was like a box turtle who'd been sickly a long time: you don't realize it's dead until it starts to smell. 

You think back to the last time you fed the turtle.  She didn't wake up when you put food in the terrarium; maybe she hadn't been "just sleeping."  When was the last time you changed out the turtle's newspaper?  Did you fill her water bowl very recently, or is it full because the turtle is no longer drinking? 

Just when did that thing die, anyways?

 

 

 

In Which I Muse on Knitting with Plant Fibers

I've never liked the sound of the word mojo. While I appreciate its meaning in modern parlance, it feels like the speaker intended to say mole.  Saying I haven't had my usual blogging mojo sounds to me like I'm saying that I can't blog without taking a hefty swig of a Mexican sauce containing poblano peppers and in some cases, chocolate.  To my ears, the word ganja sounds like it should have the definition ascribed to mojo, but to call it such on Knitters-Knitters would no doubt cause confusion among my readers.  My last encounter with ganja took place in 1991, which makes it convenient that my blogging and knittting does not require it.  At any rate, for the past few weeks I have not had mole sauce, ganja or mojo.  The absence of one of these things has caused a sharp decline in my blogging and knitting, but it appears to be returning with the warm weather.

Moving right along.

I have finished the bamboo baby blanket!  My last bamboo project was, in my eyes, an abject failure.  I was worried that blocking the blanket would result in the same horrible droop that occurred with a baby sweater I made in 2009 (I was too ashamed to put it on Ravelry), but this particular yarn blend had enough wool to give the blanket elasticity.  It has the smooth feel of mercerized cotton, but without the weight.  And since Baby Julia lives in Southern California, the blanket doesn't need to be all that warm.

Since this blanket's edgings are knit from the top down, the pattern required me to cast on invisibly.  I'd been knitting for years before I'd heard of casting on invisibly, and the first time I read those words I assumed them to be an odd case of knitting pattern errata.  I searched the rest of the pattern to see if it contained other impossible instructions such as, "On completion of row five, levitate." 

It wasn't until I discovered Elizabeth Zimmermann that I learned "casting on invisibly" was a real thing, but her instructions and accompanying sketches were of no help to me. 

Eventually, Agatha came along in 1999.  In six short years she learned to knit, then read, and then she taught me how to cast on invisibly using the crochet chain method.  I'm hoping someday she'll teach me how to knit three-dimensional objects, as it seems I can't learn certain knitting techniques through text and schematics alone.

It must be all that mojo I smoked in the '80's.

Thank-You Notes

Yesterday afternoon when I was in the Schechter parking lot waiting for Olive, my window rolled down due to the unseasonably warm weather, a woman approached my car and introduced herself.  I'd seen her around but didn't know her name, and it turns out she is a special ed teacher who subs at Keshet.  Given that Spectaculans spread super-germs with a speed and effectiveness that rivals chemical warfare, I imagine she's at Keshet more days than not. 

She told me that she lives very close to me and that if I liked, she'd be happy to spend some time with Olive during the upcoming Spring Break.  She knows how long these breaks are for little Spectaculans (naturally, she didn't use the word Spectaculan) and their parents and she'd be happy to help out.

At one time my first instinct in such a situation would be to feebly protest, then she'd say it was no trouble, I'd say, "Oh, I couldn't impose," and we'd do a few rounds of that before I'd take down her contact information with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment.  Then I'd never call her.

Those days are gone, and that page of instructional behavior has been ripped from my personal copy of the social contract.  You'd thing that page would be a hard one to remove, being so woven into the fabric of what it means to be a well-mannered American mom, but when you have a special needs child you learn, sooner or later, that this page is perforated. I whipped out my appointment calender and took her phone number like it was a See's Candies Key Lime truffle, thanking her profusely. 

She said, Don't thank me. It would be for me -- I miss Olive over breaks!

Do I believe her?  Yes, because I want to.  Because there's absolutely no reason for her to have approached me and made such an offer.  Because working with Spectaculans does not pay enough to do it for reasons other than personal satisfaction.  Given the difficulty of the work, I'm not sure there's any amount of money that would make it appealing from a financial perspective.   And as we all know the pay scale for a special ed teacher makes no pretense of even trying to approach the level of fair, let alone, enticing.  Short of offering bone marrow and organs of which one has duplicates, there's no way to thank people who work in special education sufficiently.

Non-Californians may wonder about my See's candy reference.  See's candies are on my mind and in my mouth, because my dear friend and reader Dixie sent me a box of See's cream-centered chocolates, along with a smaller box of Easter themed, egg-shaped truffles.

The reason I'm only showing a picture of one of these truffles is because I had already eaten the other seven before I emerged from my white chocolate trance enough to realize that I had not yet taken a picture and if I didn't whip out the camera fast, all I'd have to show you would be a mountain of brown fluted paper cups.  Usually when I get a gift in the mail I take my time, photographing first the box, then the opening process, etc.  This time I took one look at the return address, tore the the box open with my nails and teeth, and scarfed down at least two truffles before ever leaving the front porch.

But here's some more pastel prettiness for you to admire. 

The blanket for the baby-on-the-way of one of the aides from Olive's former classroom is done, and is now safely in her hands.  The stockinette and garter stitch backing took a lot longer to knit than I had expected and made the project an unwieldy one, but I'm very pleased with the results.

The front side is a hodge-podge of intarsia and slip-stitch using boy-appropriate colors.  Personally I never had a problem putting my boys in pink and lavender, but one never knows another parents' comfort level when it comes to gender-influenced color choices.

This was my first time working with Swan Island merino.  I found it unforgiving and surprisingly prone to splitting, but the finished result feels so soft and smooth that it's hard to imagine even the world's most wool-allergic child being bothered by it.

As I've griped ad nauseum, the parking lot of Olive's school is small and difficult to navigate, and it seems all who enter are immediately reduced to their most Hobbesian selves.  Paradoxically, arriving very early makes the whole picking up process easier because I can find a space to wait that is legitimately mine, where no one is forced to work around the giant and unsightly obstacle that is my Wolski-mobile.  Thus, pick-up time is a great opportunity for focused and uninterrupted knitting.  Some people have a knitting project for their car that's mindless and easy to jump into, but in my situation, the parking lot is the place to work on things that involve charts, row counting and multiple yarn balls going at once.

I hope the mom-to-be likes the blanket as much as I liked Dixie's chocolates and recognizes it for what it is: a feeble thank-you for the sort of kindness that is, hopefully, self-rewarding.

More blankie photos and details here:

A Contest for the Erudite

This is the slowest blanket I have ever knit.

I have been working on this double-sided blanket now for months, doing most of the work in the Schechter parking lot while waiting for Olive to get out of school.  It's also come with me to Olive's psychiatric appointments, since, odd as it sounds, Olive usually does not.  It's been to the waiting room of my dentist, Dr. Teenie-Tiny, all the way in Andersonville.  Sometimes it's gone on car trips where I thought I was going to knit, but only ended up adding mileage to the blanket's soul.  You might assume it's been to see Dr. Bow-tie, but it has not because he has excellent news magazines in his waiting room (People and Us Weekly).

It's made several sojourns to the back porch to be photographed.

Last year I spent an ungodly amount of time working on this blanket, for Henry:

It took roughly as long to knit as it took for the Prozac to kick in and give me relief instead of spilkes.  Now Olive is the one with the spilkes, and since it's so much harder to pinpoint what is and is not working for her, it makes sense that the accompanying Supplemental While-U-Wait Project should take even longer.

I've been dragging this blanket around with me so long it's actually showing signs of wear, on the Kidsilk Haze side.

It would have been wiser for me to knit the two sides separately instead of attached, but who knew the switch from Zoloft to Paxil would cause such difficulty for Olive?   Hopefully some aggressive blocking will make the finished product less careworn.  You can see the places where I've put in temporary basting stitches, to ensure I don't knit the merino part longer than the Kidsilk Haze part.

Today is the day we officially give up on the Paxil, and hopefully, Olive will have some relief soon.  If I showed you the pick marks she's made all over her left arm and on the inside of her mouth you would cry, so I won't do that.  She is, quite literally, not comfortable in her skin.

Instead we'll have a little contest to divert us.  Usual rules: Perlman DNA okay this time; make your guesses in the comments section.  Resist the temptation to Google but if you must, make sure you make your guess sounds extra tentative.  Feel free to piggy back on someone else's guess. 

The prize is also the usual: yarn for knitters, or a Starbucks gift card for those who abstain.  I'll do the drawing on Monday.

Here's the question:

What great opening sentence am I, very roughly, paraphrasing in the opening sentence of this blog entry?  Title of novel and author, please.  Clues: for once, American readers don't have the advantage here, and I'm pretty sure I've listed it before as my favorite novel of all times next to Yates' Revolutionary Road.  I'm pretty sure it was also the favorite novel of Richard Yates himself.

Oh, and since I can hear Reader Tom from here, complaining, Dammit!  I know this one but I don't knit and I find Starbucks coffee overly bright and cistrusy, I offer a third prize option: a hardcover copy of the book itself.  Unsigned of course, since the author died in 1939.  Whoops, another clue!

Etta in her Swetta

It's fun to look at the finished product, all perfectly blocked and photographed in the best light I have at my disposal in the Great Lakes, just slightly enhanced with the "saturation" feature on Picasa. 

 

But there is nothing as satisfying...

...like seeing it on the baby herself.

I had a difficult time saving and resizing these photos when they came into my inbox because I kept passing out cold from cuteness, hitting my head on the keyboard, waking up and then forgetting what had caused me to lose consciousness in the first place.

Etta, as the Faithful 163 know, is the second baby of Teacher Emily, Olive's first teacher at Autism Academy.  Emily sports the original blonde ponytail, and was the keeper of the Sacred Notebook

She is the good experience that led to ready acceptance of this good experience...

...and this one.

When I look at Etta in her sweater, I wonder what it must be like to cut one's mothering teeth on teaching special needs children, and then, give birth to a neurotypical child.  It must be like learning to drive on a stick shift with manual steering, windows that need to be rolled up and down with a crank handle, and no turn signals so that you actually have to hang your arm out the window in the manner most people only use once: during the driver's test.  

Then, suddenly, you're driving a late-model Lexus with power everything and a built in GPS and keyless start.  Or maybe you're sitting in the backseat of a town car while someone else drives -- it's that easy. 

Or maybe you're a little extra concerned about your child's development since you know stuff that the average first-time mom doesn't.  That one morning when you're baby's just in a cross mood and doesn't give you the level of eye contact you expect, maybe you panic for a moment and need to be reminded that even 'nother kids have their "off" days.

I'm currently at work on a baby blanket for a baby-boy-on-the-way.  He will be the first child of one of the aides in Olive's classroom.  This aide has spent much of the past year in the ladies' room with Olive, which is a hard enough task when one isn't in the midst of a pregnancy that involves morning sickness.

The front of the blanket is all Kidsilk Haze, done in a slip-stitch pattern and limited to colors that feel boy-appropriate.

I made a similar blanket for baby Baley two years ago, but as you can see, on that one I went crazy with the pink and purple and ruffles.

The backing of the boy blanket is Swans Island merino, just a simple combination of stockinette and garter stitch. 

Here you can see the tacked down mitered edge border, which will continue all the way around the blanket. 

After blocking, I'll probably sew a big X in the middle of the blanket (using tiny stitches that are hidden by the slipstitch haze), going from corner to corner, to hold the two layers together.

Suspenders

Whenever I hesitate before giving Miss Susan some bit of news she's been waiting to hear from me, she says, "Don't keep me in suspenders!"  Miss Susan says other folksy things like, "Hope springs infernal," and, "They get along like calico cat and gingham dog," and I admit we were a good two years into our friendship before I spoke fluent Susan. 

Once, early on, Susan wrote at the end of an email to me, "It's always nice to hear from you."  I immediately sunk into an abyss of depression since we all know, "It's always nice to hear from you," is just another way of saying, "Best of luck in all your future endeavors."  That is, "All further correspondence from you will be interpreted as harassment."  You can imagine my confusion when I confronted Susan and she insisted that in the strange world she comes from, "It's always nice to hear from you," means, "It's always nice to hear from you."

But today we'll just focus on the suspenders. 

It's not nice to keep people in suspenders, and Olive's doctor's office apparently agrees.  The nurse called me Saturday to say that Olive tested negative in her blood work for both Crohn's and Celiac disease.  In the light of day, I can see now that Crohn's was unlikely given that Olive does not present the main symptoms that sent me to the GI doctor: waking up in the middle of the night with diarrhea, unexplained fevers, weight loss, and bunny-stomping abdominal pain.  Also, Olive has grown in both height and weight since her last well-child visit, holding steady in the fifth percentile (much like her Mommy).

No results on the stool sample yet and no solid (groan) clue about the cause of the diarrhea, but it's a tremendous relief to take Crohn's off the table.  We have switched Olive to a gluten free diet anyways, and for the past two days she's had close-to normal BMs at home.  This is her usual pattern though, with the watery stuff being reserved for school.

I saw Olive's psychiatrist on Friday, who feels the diarrhea is anxiety-related.  He switched her (it's a gradual tapering process) from Zoloft to Paxil, since apparently Zoloft has been linked with diarrhea for some people.  One could argue that if you're holding a hammer every problem is going to look like a nail, and that as a psychiatrist he's always going to go to look to the brain as being the source of all problems.  But if switching SSRI's can spare Olive from a series of barium studies, it's Something To Try.

If you're shopping for Gluten Free foods, Trader Joe's is a terrific source. They even gave me a print-out of all their gluten free items.  It's interesting that Olive's favorite foods -- chana masala, basmati rice, fresh salsa, beans, meat, meat and more meat -- are all gluten-free.  She never eats the bread part of a sandwich.

The only trouble with Trader Joe's is that the check-out staff is chatty.  I really, really didn't want to talk, and the clerk was not happy with my short answers.  No, I'm not having a party.  Yes, I have a lot of children.  Yes, one of them is gluten free.  No, I've never had the flourless chocolate cake before but I'll take your word that it's delicious.  Yes, it's been a long week.

Finally, she leaned in close and whispered, "Would you like me to check you out extra slowly, to delay the time until you have to go home?"

I may be reserved, but I'm not made of stone.  That question completely disarmed me and unleashed a lengthy monologue about my youngest child's bowel habits that perhaps went into more detail than the clerk had expected.  Hey, she started the conversation.

But you didn't, and given the amount of times I've made you read the word "diarrhea," I feel obligated to show you some pretty pictures.

Here's a baby blanket in progress, for a boy on the horizon.  Kidsilk Haze is my favorite thing these days; I love how light and airy it knits up.

All the same, I'm going to knit a backing for this blanket using smooth, Swans Island merino. Some people don't like the feel of fuzzy against their skin.

Looking at Lene's baby hats makes me want to try my hand at piping. Some people just don't like dressing their boys in ruffles (go figure) but piping, I believe, requires slow laborious work and picking up stitches: just like ruffles.

And here's the beginnings of a sweater I'm making for a certain little boy whose having his second "real" birthday on Leap Day.  I'm using Noro Silk Garden sock yarn and a fingering weight merino, with Isager lace-weight alpaca as a knit-along for extra softness.

Last Exit to Where the Tree Grows

When I love something I tend to name it multiple times.  One of my children, for example, has been called everything from Sausage Rumpus to Buggy to Meat Feet, and has now accepted that she's going to be Cream Cheese for the duration.  Our deal is as long as I don't slip up and call her this in public, she gives me the continued right to use it privately.

I named this baby sweater many times while I was working on it. After knitting two scarves which were mind-numbing soul-killing exercises in self-control, I wanted to make something where I did everything exactly the way I wanted.  This meant Rowan Kidsilk Haze and Aura, it meant lots of colors, it meant ruffles, and it meant using the antique Czech buttons that LB's mom gave me for Christmas. 

It looks like there's quite a lot of fussy buttonry on this 6 month-sized sweater, but I wanted to use all the buttons that came on the card.  Each button is different, and they look more beautiful together than they do apart.

Whenever I do something in exactly the manner I want, I jump through flaming hoops of self-justification to validate that decision.  I realize this sounds beyond silly, as if I expect one of the bus drivers in the Keshet parking lot to look at me sternly and say, "You're not fooling anyone -- that project could easily be made with Manos of Uruguay you already own instead of Noro you had to buy."  But it's one of the knitting games I play with myself: like not allowing myself to open a box of yarn I've ordered until I've blocked the project I'm currently finishing.  Or making myself do ten rows on a "have to" before allowing myself a large block of time for the "want to" project.  I'm guessing I'm not the only knitter who does this sort of thing.

The beauty of knitting for a baby you've never met is that you have no idea of her preferences. What I do know is that her mother is a very conscious mother.  By that I don't mean she reads tons of books on various parenting philosophies and attends workshops and symposia on the mothering experience.  I mean that she pays attention to that inner voice that tells her what feels right and what feels instinctual, and does not allow the pressure of current trends to influence her.  I think we can all agree she'd want me to knit her baby a sweater in which every single choice, from the colors to the yarn to the buttons, was based on what felt pleasurable to me. 

This is the Annabelle Lee sweater (loosely based on Elizabeth Zimmermann's February Baby Sweater).  Because this sweater, ...she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.  More pics and details can be found here:

A Long Time Ago...

... a million years B.C.

LB had a girlfriend and this girlfriend wasn't me.

LB hadn't yet met me, it being 1986 and all. He's a patient man, but wandering the earth while he waited for the unknown but essential ingredient that was me, well, he got lonely. And he dated a young woman who shared his enthusiasm for classical music, specifically his fondness for violin music. I know it pains at least one of you (Tamara) when I say this, but to me, the sound of a violin is and will always be an assault on my ears. I am not sure why this is. I love how the cello sounds and I don't mind the viola, but the violin? I confess, I have on numerous occasions taken advantage of the fact that violin rhymes with cacophonous din, just to bug LB.

This is my "I'm about to go hear violin music" posture.

Me and a coupla of my best gals, right before LB and I left for the chamber music concert last Sunday.

So anyway, this girlfriend was very fond of him and wanted to make him a scarf, but as she was neither a knitter nor a weaver, this presented some problems. Undaunted, she purchased him a Brooks Brothers scarf. Then she took a small oval of muslin, carefully hemmed it, and hand-embroidered a violin on it and the name "Joe," (that's what she called him; she was a bit of an odd bird). Finally she sewed the oval patch onto the scarf. LB wore this scarf long after the break-up because he liked it, and because he did still love the violin, and his old girlfriend had the (conscious? unconscious?) foresight not to sew her own name on it.

This scarf gave me very mixed feelings. It's a nice scarf, and her embroidery was so painstaking, so earnest, that it was hard for me not to feel fond of her. And yet, since everyone who knows us knows that I knit and sew, many people assumed I had embroidered the scarf and that bothered me.

With LB's consent, I carefully removed the oval from scarf and put the oval patch someplace safe. Unfortunately, we've moved seven times since I removed the patch, so its whereabouts are currently unknown. But it's somewhere safe. Indeed, somewhere safe from us.

Now we had a new problem: a large oval "clean spot" on the scarf. As I do with most conundrums, I called Miss Susan.

She said, "Mail me the scarf and I'll fix it." Susan does machine embroidery, and she adorned the scarf thusly:

As you can see, LB has worn this scarf so many years hence that the "clean" spot is long gone, and one would never know that at one time it had a much more subtle and gentle declaration of affection.

At that early point in our marriage I would not have had the courage to make so bold a statement (and in such a feminine font!) and expect LB to wear it to work. But hey, Susan put that embroidery on there, and who am I to argue with Miss Susan?

LB was fine with the scarf's new tone of authority. Remember, we're talking a man who at one time wore burnt orange jeggings that made him look as if he should be holding an empty gruel bowl and asking, "Please, Sir, may I have some more?"

It's still a good scarf, but it's begun to pill in places. And since I've gotten a lot more serious about my knitting than I was way back when, a new scarf was in order this year. I've complained about the tedium of knitting this particular scarf, but it is finally finished.

I used Isager Alpaca 2 for this scarf, and knit it on 2.5mm needles.

The scarf also contains, as you can see in this photo, a not insignificant amount of spaniel fur. Nothing says "I love you" like embedded spaniel fur.

Pictures of LB in the new scarf will go up over the weekend: that's when I get to see him in natural light.