Rhinebeck

I have been so bad about posting personal stuff because I started another blog. Take a peek and let me know what you think.
Anyway, I went to Rhinebeck to the Sheep & Wool festival a few weekends ago. We stayed in Woodstock with our friends at their home tucked away in the woods. It was a spectacular weekend with beautiful fall foliage. The dads took the kids at the festival for kid fun, while Alison and I walked around and petted wool. I showed amazing restraint and only came home with soap. I don't need any more fiber in my home. In fact, I probably have a few years of knitting to get through the fiber I already have. I just inherited some wool from a woman who was cleaning out the house of a departed woman. She truly had a stash beyond life expectancy. Actually what I saw, which was supposedly about 1/3 of the amount was mind blowing.

At the end of the festival my friends (who were already in the market) caved in and bought a beautiful silk angora bunny rabbit. I've always kind of wanted a bunny to spin from, but didn't want to bring yet another pet home. My friend doesn't spin, so maybe we can trade some fur for some spun angora. How fun! The bunny's name is Caramel.

Hat from Lisa

This beautiful hat was a present from Lindsay's aunt and my sister Lisa. It has become Lindsay's favorite hat and fits her beautifully. I'll have to pin Lindsay down to take an overhead photo of the hat because it comes together in thirds to meet at the top.

Gretel

I have been working on this hat by Ysolda Teague, or some version of it for a while. The actual knitting wass quick and fun once my addled little brain could handle it. I've been on a yarn diet for a while, so I chose a lovely ginger colored yarn from my stash. I once knew what yarn it was, but it was given to me from a photo shoot, so it didn't have it's label. Anyway, the yarn was many years old, so I'm sure the color was probably discontinued. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. I was 3/4 finished when I finally ran out of yarn.

I'm not a big fan of knitting things twice (which explains why I have had only one sock finished for about a month now), but decided that I really wanted a slouchy beret of my own. I brought a lot of projects with me to France when I visited my father. I wasn't sure how his energy level would be and I think that I had fantasies of how much time I would have without a 4 year-old to entertain. I knit a lot on the airplane home (8 1/2 hours) and then finished it yesterday. The yarn is a wool/angora blend, so there's good stitch definition with a nice halo of soft fluff. I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

little hat

I finished this little pink hat while I was in France. It's a bit big on Lindsay, but still looks cute on her. Besides it's PINK, which is the ultimate color for Lindsay. She's turned into such a girlie girl wearing only dresses, ruby red sparkly shoes a la Dorothy and preferring pink over other colors. I'll have to remember this phase when she's a teenager. This hat was inspired by all of the cute hats that I saw on Mustaa Villaa's site.

We went away this weekend with friends. After a while I noticed that their sofa was made with a knit stitch. How funny. Knitting knitting everywhere! Neil hates this photo of him and wants me to add the asterix that he just woke up.

Tree Sweaters

Here's a funny article today about a town in Ohio that is putting sweaters on the trees along one main avenue.

Poetry in Stitches

Here's my new favorite sweater from the book Poetry in Stitches. I bought the book and a kit for this sweater years ago. I didn't enjoy knitting it because the row repeats were so long, I couldn't memorize them. That meant that I had to have my nose stuck in the book to look for each upcoming stitch. The glacially slow rate was killing me, so I put it down and there it sat glaring at me from my closet for years.

In a fit of spring cleaning last year, I pulled the sweater out (calling the 2" I knit a sweater is reaching a bit) and decided that this was adding to my psychic weight. I asked Mari, a former knitting student of mine, to finish it for me. She did a beautiful job and it is one of my favorite warm sweaters. It goes beautifully with the green scarf my sister made me. Lest one thinks I don't knit at all, I made the hat.

At my former fiber arts school, Urban Knitter, Mari met one of our teachers Shirley Paden. Mari instantly stood out as a star pupil with her instant grasp of new concepts as well as her lovely and insanely prolific knitting. Mari has gone on to be one of Shirley's main knitters when she's designing a project for Vogue Knitting or one of the other magazines she designs for.

The sweet smell of childhood

Have you ever had something that transported you back to when you were a kid? It could be an old photo, a taste, a smell. For me it was this book last year. I hadn't thought of this book for at least 30 years, but when I saw it in Barnes and Noble last Christmas, I remembered having it as a kid. It had the added memory of the smells from the scratch and sniff. I seem to be thinking about smells a lot lately.

This year it was another book that transported me back. Crictor! I loved and forgot this book as I did the Christmas one. I found it in a box of Neil's old books that his mother had saved. I am thrilled to have this book back in my life. It's really sweet. I wonder if anyone else remembers either of these books.





Crictor the boa constrictor was sent as a present by the woman's son. After she identifies him as non-poisonous, she embraces him as a beloved pet. He holds her book for her as she knits him sweaters. You see him happily sporting the sweater she knit here in the snow. What better pet than one who enables and appreciates knitting??

Scarves

We had a holiday celebration at Lindsay's school today. All the parents bring in food and mingle and then everyone gathers together to sing holiday songs. I'm such a sap that it makes me misty eyed each year. Can't imagine how much of a basket-case I will be when Lindsay is in her first school play!

We are so lucky this year to have two lovely teachers. I knitted them each a scarf as a way of thanking them for all of their hard work.



This scarf is made using Barbara Walker's Open Star Stitch. The yarn is a mystery since it's from a ball someone gave me. It is soft and a bit fuzzy.



This is from the Knitty pattern Wisp. I made it with one ball of kidsilk haze yarn that I dyed using Kool Aid. It was a test skein for a pattern I wrote for the first Stitch and Bitch book. The pattern in the book is hand dyed also and is called To Dye For sweater.

The flowers are growing

I've been knitting a few rows of the intarsia here and there. I must admit that I needed a little auto-pilot knitting, so I knit one of the sleeves. I'm getting slowly better at the intarsia. I've been replacing the plastic bobbins with handmade "butterflies" (as Shirley Paden calls them). The plastic bobbins add quite a bit of weight that makes the knitting a bit unpleasant. Basically, the butterflies are just small center-pull skeins that you make by wrapping the yarn around two fingers. They are lightweight, so they are much nicer to knit with. You can see a couple of them at the bottom of the knitting.

After the intarsia is done, there's a bit of embroidery to do on top of it. I might scale that back a little. For one thing, I'm not very skilled at embroidery and for another, it might just be gilding the lily.

Intarsiaaaaack

I am currently knitting the Wildflower sweater for Lindsay from Lucinda Guy's book Handknits for Kids. When you look at the photo above, you think how cute. The colorwork is going to be really pretty when it's finished. When you look at the photo below, you think, boy is she nuts to knit something in intarsia with all those cursed bobbins tangling up on the back of the work.


I'm having a hard time finding a photo of the project. This is the best I could find. You have to scroll down to see the Wildflower sweater. It's going to be so sweet when it's finished. I was even able to use some stash yarn for the project, and only had to buy two additional skeins. I'm pretty much sticking to the same color-scheme for the sweater because I think Lucinda's color combinations are really gorgeous. I also really like the Dougie sweater and hat/scarf set in the book as well as the Jack Frost jacket and the knitted flowers. Does anyone ever really knit these baby blankets? Seems like an insane amount of work!

I am slowly getting better at the intarsia. I was being stingy with the amount of bobbins I made and was carrying one skein of blue across the whole thing. I added a few more blue bobbins and am now only carrying one color across the back at any given time. I can't say I love this technique. I also think that I'll make the back of the sweater plain blue because I can't really stomach the idea of another side of this glacially slow progress.

On another note, I've started a knitting group in my neighborhood. We meet the first Wednesday of each month at the Tea Lounge. So far there have only been one or two people who have come, but they have been really interesting women, so it's been very enjoyable.

Yellow Dress

Photos at long last! Isn't there something about the cobbler's children.....
I'm pretty happy with this dress. It fits Lindsay well. Hopefully I will get two seasons out of it. I made the length for a 5 year old. Keep in mind this pattern is from the early 70s, so short was in!!

I decided that smocking the variegated yarn probably wouldn't look great, so I changed the yarn to a solid. I'm pretty happy with the results. Lindsay likes it and very sweetly tells people that her mommy made it. And, no I don't bribe her with lollipops to do that!

Spinnerin

I've been knitting a pattern from this 1972 copy of Spinnerin. It has a lot of fabulous patterns that I will post and knit later. You can see a photo of the dress I'm making below. I've made a bunch of changes, namely having it stockinette instead of reverse stockinette. I also used a variegated yarn and a contrasting color on the smocking. It's actually done, but I need to snap a photo of Lindsay wearing it.

White cardigan

I actually knitted this little sweater for Lindsay last summer when I decided she needed a plain white cardigan for cool evenings. When it was all seamed up, I realized that the arms were *way* too short. So the sweater sat around for months and months. Finally I added a couple of inches on to the arms and body of the sweater. I camoflaged the join with some nice ribbon and voila. The sleeves are still too short (although less so than before) because it took me so flippin' long to make the alteration. Eegads. I can add on to the sleeves more easily this time since they are knitted down. But, I'll probably procrastinate....see where this is going?

SPECS
Pattern: Dotty from Jaeger Handknits JB29
Yarn: Mystery yarn from a cone someone gave me. It's so unbelievably soft I think it might be cashmere.
Changes: I decided not to embroider the little dots on the sweater. I made a couple and they looked awful, so I decided to quit while I was ahead. I lengthened the crazy short sleeves and added a ribbon.

aran lace scarf

I just completed a bulky-weight lace scarf for a fundraiser at my daughter's school. The money will go to the scholarship fund. I also donated private knitting lessons. Both of which I'm hoping someone will think are nifty and bid on.

Anyway the specs for the scarf are:
Takhi Lana yarn
size 15 addi needles
Barbara Walker lace insertion pattern called Dayflower. The pattern gently undulates on the sides, which adds a bit of grace to the lace.

I had knit my daughter a scarf with a worsted weight yarn in the same pattern. Time was limited to make this one for the auction, so I pulled yarn out of my stash that was quite bulky. The yarn looks a lot like aran fisherman sweaters even in the lace. Several non-knitters who saw it mentioned that.

Z hat

It's been a fun knitting week. On Thursday, I went out in the great world of grown-ups to see Stephanie Pearl-McPhee aka The Yarn Harlot speak at FIT. She was launching her book tour here in NYC. As usual, she was lovely and hilariously funny.





I also finished a little hat for baby Zach. The first one was kind of awful. I tried to do the Z with intarsia and it came out really lumpy and uneven. I might have tried to overlook that if it weren't for the fact that the hat almost fit my 3 year-old. Don't know what's happened to my knitting mojo since the shawl, but I think it has more to do with the fact that I haven't been able to sleep well lately.

Anyway, I think this hat is suitably cute for a newborn. It will get packed up with some nice kids music, some wonderful organic baby shampoo and lotion and sent off to Zach.

I have friends who had a baby 2 months premature. I think that little baby needs a hat. I just have to figure out how small to make it.

Chugging along

Knitting with Kid Silk Haze must be what it feels like to spin a spider's web. The yarn is so fine, it feels weightless. What is surprising is how warm the finished garment is.

I've been knitting along on the scarf with #20 edging from Victorian Lace Today. I finished the first edge and knitted on the center panel. The center panel is attached just above the long horizontal line, and is comprised of the short columns with the faggoting in between. The join is not immediately apparent.

Switching to the center panel was a nice break from 22 repeats of the side panel. Now I have to do a crochet cast on and start the other side panel. I will be picking up the center panel stitches on each row. I haven't done that before, so that should be interesting.

This project has been fun. I was originally going to give it away, but I've grown pretty attached to it. I might do a nice worsted weight lace stole to give away instead. I made my kiddo a scarf version for Christmas and it really came out nicely.

Victorian Lace Today

I got this book for Christmas and there are so many different projects I would love to do. I started on one with the least glamorous title. It's on page 84 called Scarf with the #20 border. I am about halfway through the first edging. It's going along pretty well. I think she has a fairly complicated system of attaching edgings onto her other shawls. This shawl only does knitted on edgings on each side of the center panel, so it is a bit less complicated. This is what the finished shawl looks like.