Gearing back up

In many ways, I'm not what you'd call a particularly adventurous person. I have no burning desire to go hang gliding, base jumping, or to get a bunch of tattoos and swallow swords. I do, however, have an adventurous streak when it comes to eating; I will try almost anything once (as was proven on our trip to China). And, apparently, this wild streak of abandon also extends to knitting. With next-to-no experience, I'm making plans for lace, dyeing (more on that later) and yes, spinning. I'm convinced I can teach myself how to do all of this.

Now, there's been a bit of an illness-induced knitting drought around here for the last week or so, but I broke it this evening by casting on for, yes, another baby hat. Once I get this one done I will be caught up for the time being on things owed and might celebrate by taking a wild girlish fling at something for myself. The adventuresome part, though? This is my first project in fingering yarn, which is also my first project in self-striping yarn and the smallest needles I've used to date (2.5 mm, size 3 for you US-sies). The going has been a bit fiddly to start, but I'm quickly getting up to speed. So far, so good. The WIP name for this little hat is "Blueberry Pie," because that's just what the yarn reminds me of (also reminds me of a fairly hideous painting I did in art school, but I won't dwell on that here). I'm really curious how the color is going to work out on this. Variegated yarns fascinate me - how they're dyed, how they knit up... The math involved in creating the repeats really appeals to my geeky side. I find myself getting very interested in learning to do some dyeing of my own.

Knitting's not the only thing that's coming back to life around here... I didn't do this myself, but I can brag on my husband for making incredible tomato egg soup the other night. This is Chinese home cooking comfort food; my sister-in-law taught us how to make it recently. He also churned out some wicked righteous oatmeal chocolate chip cookies made from organic oats. It's nice to have the house humming again with the little buzz of stuff being made. Oh yeah, and I have a bathtub full of beer, also hubby's project. It's supposed to be "resting" in the bottles for a while, but ssssssh - we sampled some. A nice, bitter little ale. More to come on that.

I'll post a picture of the hat when there's a little more to see. No pics of the food - we ate it all (sorry).

Ceci n'est pas un toboggan

The husband hat is done. Finally! This was a super-simple pattern and seemed like the kind of thing you could finish in a weekend, but apparently it takes a lot longer to knit in mommy years. One thing is for sure - I really don't like weaving in ends. Makes me nuts. Just so you know. (But one of these days I will get better with construction and finishing. Yep.)

And another thing to aspire to - that every project will not lead to moments (as nice as they may be in retrospect) of high, er, comedy. Recall the wonky sprout hat? This time, it was the cuff. The darn cuff. The pattern (which is called "Smart Hat" - I seem to have knitted the "stupid" version) tells you to knit for 25 cm before beginning the decreases. Now, despite the fact that I live in the "we're having none of your metric crap" US, I still know what side of the measuring tape to use, so I was a bit nonplussed when hubby tried on his hat and - well - let's just say he looked a bit like Dumb Donald from the Cosby Kids. When you folded up the cuff, it was freakishly long. It covered nearly the whole hat. I've considered the possibility that my husband has an unusually shallow head (in dimension only - I know, blame the victim), but I still think the sizing may be a bit off. Suffice it to say that if I knit this again in the future, I might start decreasing after, oh, say 18 or 20 of those little cms. We did have a good laugh, though, and he loves it, which is really all that matters. And I finished not a moment too soon - our recent balmier stretch gave way again overnight to freezing cold and snow, so off he went to work today in his new chapeau. Did I feel proud? Maybe a little.

What to get into next?

Tink back the knit

About a million years ago (well, actually only 14, when I first learned to knit), I promised my husband something. At the time, it was a scarf, though in retrospect I think not so much because he had a burning desire for one, but rather because as a novice knitter I was clinging helplessly to all things comfortingly rectilinear. I'm still basically a novice knitter, but age and the intervening years have brought a sort of mellowness that has made me a little more ripe for a challenge (though you will notice that I am still knitting hats in the flat and seaming them up - don't rush me). I've banged out two sprout hats in fairly short order, and when I started discussing plans for a third, and for all these other projects (none of which were the long-awaited scarf), he rather petulantly reminded me that I've yet to make good on that promise. So, flush with my recent hat-ty success, I decided to bump up to an adult size, lose the whimsical stem, and knit my deserving dude a warm, wooly watch cap. (Laurie, if you're reading, this is what might be known in some circles as a toboggan.)

It's a simple k4 p4 rib from cuff to crown, and I got off to a blazing start. Then, one night, I was trying to knit my way through a particularly deafening round of baby meltdown when I noticed it. A few rows back, I knitted a few stitches I should have purled. This is entirely understandable, given that I had a three month-old roaring at aircraft decibels in my ear, but it's really noticeable. Hubby, who lobbied hard for me to overlook the wonkiness of sprout hat #2, again argued for embracing the imperfection and keeping on with the truckin.' He even reminded me of a story I once told him about Persian rugmakers who deliberately sneak a mistake into each piece so as not to be cranking out woven affronts to Allah, who supposedly has cornered the market on perfection. Now that's a beautiful story, and far be it from me to pooh-pooh Persian rugmakers or my mate's well-intentioned cheerleading (and it is his hat, after all), but those few stitches are like an obnoxious wooly interloper giving me the fish eye evey time I see them. And I think that even if I do fix those stitches, my hat will be far enough from perfect to safely avoid being some sort of cosmic insult. So, ignoring cooler heads, I have been tinking the doggone thing back, stitch after godforsaken stitch.

(Visible in this picture is the stem of the glass that holds my gin and tonic, pretty much required for this leg of the project. And for those of you who know I'm nursing and fear for the welfare of my child, I go to La Leche League meetings. I'm way up on the whole breastfeeding thing and a little booze is OK. My daughter will not end up in Betty Ford and it just might keep me from hurting myself or someone else.) Now why, you might ask, don't I pop it off the needles, rip it back, put it back on the needles, and go on my merry way? Well, I have tried taking things off the needles before and had it work, but at the time I was only working with 30 or fewer stitches (remember those cute little sprout hats?). Right now, I'm looking at over 120 - the very thought of trying to put all those back on a needle makes me go more than a little clammy, hence the tinking. I'm trying to think of it as a Zen-like exercise - don't think, just tink. (Hey, whatever gets me through.)

Holidays, posthumously

A couple years ago, Bill McKibben, known for his excellent writings on nature and the environment, penned a slim but meaningful little book called Hundred Dollar Holiday in which he makes a case for a less materialistic approach to Christmas. I only heard about the book a month or so ago, and it really struck a chord with me, thinking as I was about the first Christmas we were to spend with my daughter. Christmas has always been a time of great joy in my family and every year I look anxiously forward to the holiday season, which always makes me feel full of contentment, good will, and hope. The problem, though, was that we were planning on spending Christmas with my parents, who have a break-the-bank policy when it comes to holiday gift giving. Their generosity is magnificent and I appreciate the love that finds its expression in the package avalanche, but an avalanche it still is, and that's not something my husband and I are comfortable raising our daughter with. It's been hard to talk to my folks about this, since their "stuff is love" understanding makes them see the lack thereof as something stingy and Grinch-ish and criticizing it makes me feel like an ungrateful wretch (I'm not). It isn't that we want our child to have nothing, but I want to be sure she doesn't get the idea - at Christmas or at any time - that meaning is conveyed by "stuff." I want her to know the season for the best it has to offer, as a time of family togetherness and joy taken in the simpler pleasures. She was really too young this year for that to matter much, but it still seemed important to lay the philosophical groundwork for what my husband and I hope to share with our little girl.

As it turns out, Fate took matters in hand... My parents' house was burglarized while they were away (ironically as they were with us for our daughter's birth), and one of the things stolen was the Christmas gift fund. It made me sad to see their disappointment at not being able to have the "first Christmas with the granddaughter" they had envisioned, but at the same time I felt relieved that the materialistic aspects of that celebration were, of necessity, going to be curtailed. My daughter got a few gifts, and we each got a small amount of spending money, but the main pleasure of our time together was had in baking, eating, visiting with kinfolk and friends, and in the joy of admiring the newest addition to the family. It was quality time, and I doubt anyone really missed the tons of presents we usually have. I know I didn't.

Calls for an anti-consumer Christmas are nothing new, but McKibben somehow manages to put that across without a lot of the bah-humbuggery that usually accompanies similar critiques. He offers, instead, a way for us to re-envision traditions in the spirit of the season. Here's a quote:

"Our strategy with Christmas, then, has gone slightly awry. We've gotten used to spending more money to make it special. But if money's no longer as valuable as time, we're offering each other a devalued currency. If you spend ten or twenty hours buying Christmas presents each year, you could use the same ten or twenty hours to make presents--time that you'd be able to spend with children, spouses, friends."

My daughter is going to be old enough next Christmas for this to really start making an impact, so that gives us a year to work on making a plan for how we want it to unfold and then pitch it to those who will share the holiday with us. I'm making a pledge to myself now that we will make the majority of our gifts next season, and I'm going to start now with drawing up a project list and thinking ahead about how to make it happen. It will be interesting to see how our own Christmas traditions develop as a family, and I think this is a great place to start. I'll close the same way McKibben did:

"But the greatest cost may be the way it's changed us, the way it has managed to confuse us about what we really want from the world. We weren't built just for this life we find ourselves leading--we were built for silence and solitude, built for connection with each other and the natural world, built for so much more than we now settle for. Christmas is the moment to sense that, the moment to reach for the real joys."

Was WIP, now *whoops*

Pride goeth before a fall, it's said, and probably because someone knitted a hat which turned out well and decided to knit another in a size larger than the pattern allowed for. No problem, thought the overconfident knitter, I'll wing it. I will simply cast on more stitches and improvise the decrease rows thus... And right up until the seaming began, the overconfident knitter thought she had scored another triumph - another near-perfect (not quite as) little sprout hat for her nephew. But wait - what's going on here at the top? It's a little... wonky. By that I mean uneven. As in the top left side is a little higher than the top right side and there's this little bulge on one side of the stem...

Husband (trying to be helpful): Hats don't have sides. They're round.
Overconfident knitter (whining): But it looks weird!
Husband: It's hardly noticeable.
Overconfident knitter: No it's not! That bulge is as big as a bus!
Husband: Well, I'm sure it will disappear once sombody actually puts it on. It will stretch out.
Overconfident knitter (in no mood to be mollified): It has to be in the decreases! The deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecreases! *eye twitches*

After much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, during which several options were considered (ripping it out and starting over, hiding it in a drawer, donating it to Gooodwill, gifting it to someone with an uneven head), the no-longer-overconfident knitter thinks she has decided to go ahead and send it to her nephew. It's really not that bad, and he's so adorable that people will likely be so distracted by his cuteness they won't notice his lopsided, ill-advised hat. And, most important of all - he lives in San Diego, so who wears wool hats there, anyway?

Next time, humility (and a pattern).

All sewn up (almost)

Here's the hat... Finished except for sewing up the back seam, which is scaring me a bit. I'm pretty pleased with it so far and don't want the darn seam to be the thing that makes me not be pleased with it. My improvisation of the i-cord topknot worked out well - I like it much better than I think I would have liked the plain crown. I might work another couple of projects in the flat before trying to master the dpns and circulars, but barring any seaming tragedies, the kiddo should be able to sport this for Xmas. Yipperoo. (For what it's worth, the actual shade of green is much darker and mossier in person - my camera isn't capturing the color well.)

Knitting is making me a bad mother (and other yarns)

the hat in progress

I am pretty granola in the parenting department - in my house we breastfeed, babywear, cosleep, and are committed to the attachment parenting philosophy. So imagine my horror when, last night, I found myself seriously considering asking my husband to give our daughter a bottle of expressed milk so that I couldkeepknitting. Normally, I hate giving my child a bottle - I prefer to nurse her, unless I'm taking a much-needed nap-cation or trapped under something heavy. Bottles are for extenuating circumstances. But there I sat, furiously working on the hat and making good progress, when darling kiddo decides it's time for a nurse-a-thon. Two hours later, she's still latched on and I am about to break into a sweat as I sit there and stare at the hat. I'm so puffed up by my success thus far (many dropped stitches successfully rescued, two whole rows ripped back without so much as twisting a stitch) that I feel half-crazed at the thought of having to take a break. So what do I do while sitting there, maddeningly idle? I formulate an insane plan (which almost surely exceeds my current skill set) to substitute the plain-crown finish in the pattern I'm using for one with a cute little topknot that looks something like a stem on a gourd. I tend to agree with the people (and there are apparently a lot of them, at least in the design world) who think that baby headgear is substantially improved by the addition of ears, tassels, little elfin tendrils, and the like. I'm modifying the pattern as we speak, so stay tuned and wish me luck. I really don't need a WIP disaster with Xmas at t-minus four days and counting, especially if I'm going to keep the bottles at bay.

All I want for Christmas...

...is to be able to knit while nursing. (Or would that be "knursing?") I have learned to do many things one-handed since my daughter was born (including typing this blog entry), but sadly I don't see knitting being added to that list. Shame, since I really want to get something finished for her by Xmas. To that end, I've put the WIP cardigan aside for now and started a hat, for which I ended up buying more yarn (and two new needles!) despite a) it being almost Xmas, and b) the fact that I promised myself I'd try and work from my stash for a while. And when I say "stash," what I really mean is (only) two moderately-sized boxes full, and much of that was just given to me years ago by a knitting friend who bought it for a project and wound up hating it - I didn't actually buy it (so that makes it better). Still, I should really try and restrain myself. But I was in the craft store buying a present for someone else, and there it was - some lovely green wool that would be just perfect for the kiddo's hat... and I caved. It's on the needles as I speak. I'm really not happy with the way my cast-on edge looks (sloppy) and have been considering starting over, but I keep telling myself that this is a roll-edge hat, so the slop will be hidden, and if I keep madly frogging (the cardigan is practically croaking), then no finished work by Xmas. Oh dear.