Knitters-Knitters

Shhh...Coat is Sleeping

The maternity swing coat has been lovingly washed in a shampoo for color-treated hair, and is now resting comfortably on my living room carpet.  Project details:

Pattern: "Indigo" by Marianne Isager in Japanese Inspired Knits.

Yarn: Tvinni (merino) and lace-weight wool, both by Isager.

Needles: 4mm.

Ravelried here. 

As you can see, the sleeves, hem and collar are in a different dye lot than the body of the sweater.  This is because for some reason, Isager markets their yarn in the US in skeins exactly half the size of how they're sold in Europe.  I loved this book, but dang, I wish they'd made that clear!  Or, barring that, I wish I'd actually read the label on the skein and noticed that it was only 50g and not 100.  If you make it, buy double what you think you need.  Unless you happen to be in Denmark.  Then you may go about your business per prior instructions.

There is also a...design element where I did the color-work differently on one sleeve than the other.  The right sleeve was done correctly, with the band of gold going all the way around the wrist.  For reasons unclear to me but which may have something with my focus being diverted by a particularly compelling episode of Dexter, I did not continue the gold all the way around the left wrist.  This discrepancy didn't come to my attention until the sweater had already been washed and laid out, at which point I reminded myself that perfectionism is a trap I won't fall into into which I will not fall. 

To avoid drawing unnecessary attention to this unique sleeve feature, I hope I can count on the wearer to always keep her hands well apart while wearing this garment.  No slumping forward with elbows on the table, forearms pressed together.  No outstretching of arms and clasping hands with thumbs aligned in the volleyball "bump" position. 

In fact, Andra, being pregnant and all, maybe you should just hold off on the volleyball.  Parcheesi, Go to the Head of the Class and even Sorry! are permissable, but make sure you drink lots of fluids first and take frequent breaks.  Now, if a situation arises postpartum where volleyball truly cannot be avoided and there's a chill in the air that calls for a long sweater, I ask that you "set" and "spike" only.  As a favor to me.

He Complains...

...but I think he'll feel a little sad when the sweater's washed, blocked, and on its way to its rightful recipient.

The next project will be LB's birthday sweater, no joke, for being such a good sport with the modeling.

In Which LB Totally

...rocks the maternity sweater.

The sleeves are complete.  Only the collar is left to go!

Amber Waves

I did it!  I did the whole 18 spool oeuvre, and I enjoyed it.  After the miles and miles of increasing, swooping rows of stockinette, managing the absurd tangle of yarn bobbins was easy and satisfying.  Now I just have to do the sleeves and collar, which I'm expecting to fly by.

And fly by it must, because this swing coat is going to have a short shelf life.  It's meant to be enjoyed from November through most of January, at which point the recipient is expected to shrink considerably.

The cover gal, as you can clearly see, is a tall and skinny affair.

It looks beautiful on her and even more fetching on my patient model LB (also a tall and skinny affair). Still, I think this coat, with all that bell-shaped swing, was designed for someone not so skinny.

Someone... a bit more spherical in the midriff region.

Someone...temporarily convex.

That is, if I can get LB to agree to take it off.

Breasts, Bossa Nova, and a Contest Involving Sausage

You probably thought you were home free regarding extraneous Jen information when I posted the results of my most recent pap smear, but I feel compelled to tell you my mammogram results were good, too. 

As I mentioned last year, I go to Waukesha for mammograms because they give you while-you-wait results.  In the two years I've been going there, I've never seen another woman in her 40's or even her 50's in the waiting room.  Where are you 40- somethings getting yours done? Are you blithely going to whatever imaging center's the closest and then waiting patiently for that little card in the mail?  Do you worry while you wait, or are you pleasantly surprised when you get the postcard?  Oh, that's right.  I had a mammogram last week.  I had that kind of mammogram exactly once.  It took two weeks to get my results, and I lost 8 pounds.  Not coincidentally, it's when I first became acquainted with Dr. Bowtie.

I've been working on an idea I have for people who are afraid to fly, and who are also afraid of diagnostic procedures (I'm certain the cross-over between these two groups is huge).  It works like this: you board a very large plane and are immediately anesthetized.  In an airborne exam room, a team of doctors, radiologists and lab technicians go right to work, giving you a mammogram, a colonoscopy, a pap smear, a CBC and, if applicable, a liver function test and sed. rate analysis.  When you land, you are given the results of everything.  As an added bonus, you're in Hawaii!  It'll be called Global Imaging. 

Going to Waukesha also means going to Milwaukee and visiting the folks, and unfortunately, being stoned on valium anxious about my impending mammogram, I forgot to pack my camera for the trip.  I wish I'd brought it, because after the mammogram LB took me to a yarn store in Elm Grove called  The Yarn House.  It was the tiniest yarn store I'd ever seen, and the sign on the door had a list of presidents who'd served terms in office during the years the store existed.  I think JFK was the first on the list.

The elderly proprietress immediately asked LB and me if we were brother and sister.  Surprisingly, we've been asked this before.  In the past it's always amused me but now I'm starting to wonder.  It could explain a lot: missing arms, autism...you think?  Naaaahhhh. 

She also told us that she'd known Elizabeth Zimmermann personally.  The first time EZ came to the shop with her husband, she warned the owner: Brace yourself: he's charming.  The proprietress showed every sign of being a flirt, and when her younger assistant went to get a ladder to access the Rowan Kid Mohair for me, she said, Why are you bothering with that?  We have a tall man, here, gesturing gracefully at my brother LB.  Later, when she was ringing up the sale and LB tried to interject that surely I didn't need another 24" circular needle in size 4mm, she said to him, You mind your manners!

I bought the Rowan Kid Mohair in a rather breasty shade of pink, and unvented a stitch pattern for it.

I call it the bossa nova, because it's physically impossible to do it without humming The Girl from Ipanema.  Knit three rows.  On the fourth row, it's knit one, then knit the next stitch together with the loop directly below it from the previous garter stitch ridge.

My left thumb nail suffered a terrible blow in 1999 and hasn't been the same since.

These are working hands, and they date me.  The rest of me looks much younger.

 

Besides, Elizabeth Zimmermann?  Total man-hands, you know.

Repeat these four rows.  If I dug up my Harmony stitch guide I'd probably find this listed as garter stitch variation #3, but I like Bossa Nova better.

Enough with the breasts and the pink already; let's move onto sausage.  It's been a long time since I've held a contest, so here we go:

On I-94, driving from Milwaukee to Chicago, 'round about Kenosha you will pass a sign that says, " ___ Recreation Area."  If you are as immature as LB and I, then you will giggle at this sign every time you drive past it.  What is the name of this recreation area?

You may Google; one guess per person, please.  The prize is a Usinger's gift assortment called the Snacker's Delight and it looks like this:

If there is more than one correct guess, I'll do a drawing.  USA participants only this time around, given Usinger's shipping parameters.  The drawing will be on Friday, October 16th.

 

Back and Forth, Credit and Blame, Bask and Wallow--But with Knitting

Right now I'm working on Marianne Isager's Indigo from her book Japanese-Inspired Knits. This swing coat features a long expanse of stockinette with gradual increases, thus making every row longer than its predecessor. 

As you can see from the picture it's just rows of knit and purl, back and forth, ebb and flow, spring forward and fall back, loosy lefty and tightie rightie, occasionally increasing, with a brief flurry of break-neck, hold-onto-your-hat activity when you get to put the sleeve stitches on holders.  But mostly it's just back and forth. 

I was working on the coat late last night and it nearly put me to sleep right there in front of Dexter Season 3, in spite of all the blood spatter and close-ups of Jimmy Smits's cheekbones.  Just to shake myself up a bit, I read ahead in the pattern to the part where the wave colorwork begins.  Here's what I found:

Prepare 18 bobbins or yarn butterflies, nine with MC1 and MC2 held tog, and nine with one strand each of MC1 and CC1 held tog.

Comic relief!  I'll bet it's even funnier in the original Danish.

This wave pattern is pretty, but not 18 balls (19, counting the main color of the background) going at the same time pretty.  Nothing is that pretty and if such prettiness even exists, no human being deserves it.

Also, it's a thankless 18 bobbins.  I look at the picture of the finished coat and all I see is blue and white.  The fact that some of those stitches are blue and some are white and some are blue and white mixed together is going to be lost on most admirers over the age of 40.  If I'm going to do even 4 bobbins, I need to know that the extra work will be apparent to the casual observer.  In fact, I'd like those 4 bobbins to do the work of 8, as in Fair Isle colorwork that looks like tons of colors at once when it's really just two per row. 

I'm not the mom who knits love notes into the hem facings of her children's sweaters where no one but the child will ever see them, unless said child accidentally puts the sweater on inside-out.  I'm the mom who puts her child in a hand-knit, multi-striped cotton affair when the school supplies list called for "sweatshirt" and sews her own label onto the inside of the collar so there's no question of the sweater being store-bought.  

This might explain why it never occurred to me to write Knitters-Knitters under an pseudonym.  I will gladly risk blame in the hopes of credit, at least, when it comes to knitting.  And writing.  And sewing.  I don't mind cooking or doing good deeds anonymously or performing algebra under an assumed name, and I'll gladly sew in zippers or affix buttons with no hope of praise.  I do think I'm good at selecting the appropriate buttons, but not so much that I wouldn't be willing to surrender a reputation for good taste if it meant people would know I was at fault should those buttons fall off.  Summing it up here, all must know what I've written and knit and sewn, except in the case of buttons or zippers (where I'd rather lay low until said zippers and buttons have proven themselves over time). 

Honestly.  Do you think Marianne Isager really expects someone to come to the colorwork part of the pattern and blithely start the process of winding, or did she just sneak that in there to see if we're paying attention?   If you've knit this swing coat and really did reenact the battle scene from Les Miserables with yarn bobbins, I'd love to hear from you.  I'd love to give you credit.

Little O in Her Mie's Jacket

Olive's fall coat is complete! 

Pattern: "Mie's Jacket" by Marianne Isager, from her book Classic Knits.

Yarn: Alpaca 2 and Wool 1, i.e., the yarn recommended in the pattern.

Ravelried here:

I loved making this jacket.

Even the facings.

The yarn was a happy compromise for Olive and me, since I prefer wool and she (based on the tummy-patting scale) likes alpaca best.

Let's hope for a long autumn and lots of in-betweenish temperature days.

Fall Chatter

Yesterday afternoon LB and I took our weekly walk with Olive in her stroller, the walk where we assess everything we meant to do in the past seven days but didn't accomplish and all the impending threats, real or imagined, of the week to come.  As we rounded the corner of Tamarind and Heul, we saw a squirrel dash across the sidewalk.  When we got closer, we saw his cheeks were filled with nuts and I said, "Look!  He's...squirrely!"  There was something very satisfying about that: a squirrel being squirrely.  Squirrels are also being squirrely in springtime, when they gather in large groups outside our schoolroom window and have loud, frolicsome, seemingly-indiscriminate squirrel sex, but I like the nuts in the cheek thing much better.  Squirrels in the fall: chubby-faced boy scouts of the animal kingdom.  Squirrels in the spring: rodents.

Olive is allergic to autumn and this walk was suggested, in part, to distract her from her itchy eyes.  The Keshet school nurse and I have become fast friends over the issue of what to do about Olive and her eyes. Olive's eczema is under control through the magic of Mometasone (it works, though included in the list of side effects is the slight risk that she'll grow a tail) but her eyes are still three with nature.  

Today, Keshet Nurse called and told me she'd spoken with Olive's pediatrician, who suggested we give Olive eye drops called Zaditor.  At this point I'd like a show of hands: who here would like the job of administering eye drops to a non-verbal, extremely strong seven-year-old with sensory issues? 

The question of how to get those drops in Olive's eyes made me remember something.  A repressed memory, if you will, and something I hope LB does not recall: 17 years ago, when my cranky miniature dachshund required manual expression of her anal scent glands and then-boyfriend LB took care of the deed with no complaint, I may have said, "I'll owe you one."

If all that came with fall weather was a heightened histamine response, then Olive wouldn't like it very much.   Luckily, she's a person who loves to wear sweaters, especially alpaca ones, and who is not allergic to wooly things.  Her Marianne Isager jacket is coming along nicely and I'm almost finished with what I'm pretty sure is the only boring part: the bottom.

When I have a zillion yarn ends to weave in, as is the case here, I like to make it into a game: for every boring row I complete, I get to weave in one yarn end.  If there are many, many rows, then I add snipping the end of the woven-in yarn to the equation (one snip per row, after all the weaving is complete). Here you can see how many rows of the boring bottom I've knit, and how many ends I have yet to weave in and trim:

Elizabeth Zimmermann says to resist the temptation to weave in the ends until the entire garment is complete, but I feel that hanging, loose ends are not to be borne.  Even though it means more work on the off chance that I have to rip out part of my knitting. 

Hanging, unwoven-in ends are like full garbage bags piled by the side door: bags that LB has promised to take out "later."  Or rolls of toilet paper which have been started but not yet inserted into the toilet paper spindle.  Or cabinet drawers left open.  Or burnt out light bulbs not yet replaced.  Or the hideous, square, temporary dental crown (it looks like it was purchased on the Ukrainian black market, for an herbivore) I must wear until I can get an appointment with Dr. Teeny Tiny to put in the permanent one.  Need I go on?  No?

Let's just enjoy how close we're getting to the Fun Part: the color-banded sleeves.  Even though there'll be a bunch more ends to weave in.

What Do I Have to Say for Myself?

It's true, I haven't been blogging as much.  Free time, meaning those hours not consumed with the education of the four middle children (particularly the vagaries of 7th grade math) has been pretty much consumed by knitting.  I have not been this captivated by knitting in a long time.  For most of the summer I knit sporadically, only able to constipate out a very few finished items.  There was the stripey sweater, a striped tank, the Keshet shawl, and...was that it?  I'm not counting Sabina's cardigan because I didn't really get going on that until school started.

I'm working on a little dress for my impending niece during the background of my day, while children do independent work:

But my solitary late-nights, when I can spread out all my skeins and directions and my pen and the back of whatever envelope I'm using for row counts, are filled with Marianne Isager's "Mie's Jacket."  In this series of photos, you can see it going from yarn...

...to its humble beginning: a chevron triangle...

...to a stand-up collar. It's very hard to visualize a collar unless you've seen the photos in the book, and even then it's not so easy.

This is the back of the jacket, from collar to armholes. 

Those colorful stripes, which were a total pain in my rumpus and involved the dreaded intarsia, should stand out more after blocking.  They'd better.

Here's the front and the back together, up to the stripes.

And here's where I'm at today.  All the body stitches are joined on one needle.  You see the jacket emerging now, right?  This isn't like when we played Find the Howler monkey in my coffee table, or Do you see the French nun?  This one should be easy.

But back to school: Sabina did well on her placement exams and is enjoying herself.  At least, I assume she's enjoying high school because she just called me and she wants to stay late today for a meeting of the such and such club.  Debate?  Speech?  Theater?  I'm pretty sure it was something verbal, but my brain immediately discarded the information in the relief of discovering the call was of a benign nature.  Last year, whenever I saw Public School in my caller ID, it meant that Olive was itching and had to be picked up at once.  Then, after I arrived, the change in activity invariably made her forget about scratching and there we were home early for no good reason.  I've only gotten one Olive Is Itchy phone call so far this year, and the nurse was willing--nay, eager--to try distraction techniques.

Olive is also enjoying school.  It's easy for me to tell when Olive is happy with school because on weekends, she tends to drag one or more of us to the garage door and natter, in Olive-ese, about how very tedious we all are and how the fact that none of us are Teacher Caroline is too much to be borne.  Last year when she was unhappy with school, she'd cry in the mornings and try to pull me away from the door when it was time to go.

Olive has been very huggy recently, not just reciprocating hugs (she's done that for a few years) but actually initiating them and in hug-appropriate situations.  I get a lot of hugs as does LB, but as for who gets the most that's an easy one: Maria.

Today I did something I always swore I'd never do.  Sabina leaves for school in the morning before I get up and is gone most of the day, so I took the opportunity to search her room.  I'm very pleased to say I came up scratch.  It was wrong of me, but as a mother, I had to know...

..if she'd worn her new Fan cardigan to school today.

Completed Project: The Fan, Official Pictures

Fan detail, left front:

 

Ravelried here:

Go heart me! I heart those little Ravelry hearts!

 

Fan detail, right:

 

Olive is being cute off-camera:

 

Bye!