Snowflake Blocking -- Kitten Helping

It's done! I can't wait to put it on. It's blocking now, and quite damp. . . Kitten is helping out (blurry head notwithstanding).

Snowflakes in March

My snowflake sweater progresses. Tonight I grafted the underarms and sewed in loose ends. I needed a break from the turtle/cowl neck I'm working on up top. It's in a 1x1 rib and is taking forever. I actually already knit the whole thing once already and frogged it because I didn't like how it was laying. I had put in increases and it flopped over on itself in a 1950's-ish way, but unattractively. I'm going for something more scrunchy. Although you can't tell in this photo the neck is pretty wide.

Besides finishing the neck, I also still have some embroidery to do. I started by thinking I would just put some duplicate stitch over the lines where my wrapped floats show through in between the snowflakes, but then I got thinking of maybe adding some other sort of smaller, more freestyle snowflake motif on top in a lighter color, too. Maybe with some swirly bits. This whole project has been experimental from the beginning, so why not try another new thing, eh?

I cannot wait to block this thing and see the colors all settle together.

Here's a picture --

Some New Projects, Some Redirection

About a year ago I started this blog to serve a couple of functions -- to be a record of my projects over time, and to be a sort of home base from which to meet and communicate with other knitters. I discovered knitblogging quite by accident when looking up a pattern I liked on the internet and coming up with a bunch of links to the blogs of people who had knitted it. I loved being able to see the photos of different people's versions of the item (non-photo-styled versions, so you have a little extra truth in advertising. . . ), and to read about their process and benefit from their experience. Also, the commenting function of blogs means people can discuss and comment and share -- almost like we do in person. It's just so rare to be around a group of knitters, sewers, crafters for me anymore. I think the happiest I maybe ever was was when I worked at a fabric store and talked crafts all day long ;-) Crappy pay, though.

I digress.

I've noticed that my blogging has sharply fallen off about the time I got my invitation to Ravelry, and I think that's because that site serves pretty much all the functions I was looking for in a blog. I have my project journal, my communication with other knitters, plus an easy way to find all manner of information. It's not for sew-ers, unfortunately, but I don't do that so much these days either.

So I think I'm embracing this trend. I'll still update the blog periodically with new photos, but probably not more frequently than every couple of months. My heart's with Ravelry now and I don't know how much I really need the blog.

Please visit me there as username LydiaAnne.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of finished projects.

The Sienna cardigan is done and highly wearable.



Here is a close-up of the lace fronts.



I also finished a little scarf using the angora yarn I fell in love with at Rhinebeck. It's the dewdrop stitch from Walker's first treasury, and is the same on both sides. The fuzziness of the yarn obscures it a bit, but you can make out the bit of laciness I think.



and a close up . . .

Sienna moving fast!

Here's the back already up to the armhole decreases.

Many beginnings

Wool cotton sweater update: Okay, I frogged back again because I wasn't loving the look of the little openwork diamond motif in the center front of the sweater. Sadly, with my new incredibly time-consuming profession I only really knit on Saturdays anymore, somewhere between house cleaning and grocery shopping. So I frogged pretty much an entire week's work of work and it took me two more weekends to recover that ground. I put in another KC Brocade diamond there instead. Here it is looking all crumpled from being in the bottom of my knitting bag for a while.



I'm getting a little tired of the Rowan Wool Cotton. I feel like I've been working with this yarn forever, which makes sense considering that I bought this yarn to start the Gatsby project all the way back in March(!) and have been working with it *ever since* -- first as Gatsby, then as this new sweater I'm designing.

As a result (or maybe just because I wish I had more time to knit and am trying to cram in more than I can actually do) I seem to be on a rampage of starting new projects.

I started a pair of fair isle mitts with the goal of finishing them in time for the Thanksgiving trip to my mother's traditionally chilly house. I'm mostly through one mitt at this point, using up odd bits of worsted from the scrap department of my stash. The pattern is from Drops Design and I think it turn out nice once blocked. Right now the stiffness of the fair isle is puffing out above the tight ribbed cuff a bit more than I would like.



We'll see what happens here because I must admit that I have a serious and chronic case of second-mitten syndrome.

Meanwhile, I went to Rhinebeck last weekend. Sheep! Goats! Llamas! Alpacas! Bunnies! I petted all of them - shamelessly. Narrowly escaped returning home to our New York City apartment with one of each plus a Border Collie puppy. Thankfully, my husband and I showed remarkable restraint and returned simply with a couple of Christmas presents that shall remain nameless, a chunk of sheepsmilk cheese, and three little yarn purchases for moi. . .



From left to right, purple/black handpainted sock yarn (um, yes, for the girl with a hard case of second-mitten syndrome -- but I want to try at least one sock!), a natural toned pink-grey-brown worsted from Shadyside Farm, and some fuzzy, super-soft Angora yarn with steel grey and rose variegations. The bunny yarn is currently on the way to becoming a scarf.



The fuzz makes it hard to see the stitch pattern, but it's a simple little openwork, broken-rib pattern from BW's Treasury #1, called Dewdrop. I had some fun looking through the book and trying different ideas. This one is inspired by themes in The Book Thief, the October selection for KTC. More on that later.

The worsted got swatched up for the Sienna cardigan from IK Fall 06. I've been wanting to make this sweater since I first saw it in this issue. I think I would love to wear it, but somehow I just never got to it. I also didn't want to put up the cash for the suggested yarn, Blue Sky Alpacas, which is a fairly heavy worsted, and I never really came across the right substitution. I think my new Shadyside wool will be perfect for it.

I love knowing that this yarn comes from western PA, too, right between where I used to live in rural PA and where my family is from in rural, eastern OH. I can picture these sheep hanging out in my sweater on a fantastically green steep hill under that cloudy Pennsylvania sky.

I just know that this sweater will be a favorite and I haven't even started it yet. The yarn kept drawing me back to their booth again and again all day. It's exactly the kind of stuff I most love. Quality that's subtle, not flashy. Perfect in the details, striking just the right balance between natural and refined. I like the natural colors, but many of the more natural wools at the fair had a rustic, sort of look to them that was too rough for my taste, either because they were single-ply, thick-thin yarns or because they were completely undyed. Shadyside had some nice patterns for their wool, too, although I didn't buy any. I think I might just steal some of their ideas instead!

The wool is super soft like a merino, though it's from Romney sheep, and the woman from Shadyside said she had been breeding the sheep for softness. There's something poetic and lovely about that that makes me want to write a poem "bred for softness" I heard cats described once as "comfort-loving creatures" and I thought about that, how some creatures are comfort-loving and others are not so much. People too.

Vertical Darts Redux

I frogged my darts from last week and redid the midsection of my little sweater. As of today I'm up to the bottom of the V neck. I'm putting in a little openwork diamond motif there, and you can see the first half of it.



In the back, I've got a little repeat of the King Charles Brocade Motif.



Fun!

experiments with darts

I am progressing on my little sweater I'm designing as I go with the lovely Rowan Wool Cotton. I've finished the King Charles brocade panel at the bottom and am continuing in seed stitch which I quite like. I began vertical decreases below the bust, but I don't like how they look. I put in two eyelets where they begin and decided I don't like it. I also realized that I've been decreasing too quickly so the shape is a little pooched.





This is what it looks like today, but I"m going to frog back and start over with the darts. Try something a little cleaner looking, maybe a double decrease that creates some sort of vertical line. I think I may have seen something in my trusty Vogue Knitting Book. . .

Mostly work

and very, very little play right now. The first year of teaching is un-freakin'-believable.

I did, however, start a nice, soothing, easy project that keeps my knitting going without requiring actual thinking or commitment.

I love this super-soft malabrigo yarn and the color is the perfect balance between emerald and seaweed. . .



This is a scarf in the brioche stitch from EZ's Knitting without Tears. It has some garter at the bottom. I'm going to do a matching hat, using the brioche stitch, but with some other details added to tweak the shape and add interest -- like a garter or twisted rib band and a probably a pom pom.

New Leaf for Rowan Wool Cotton

I've just returned from a week and a half here



and it was wonderful. Maybe you have to live in NYC to say this about Gloucester, but -- it smelled good.

While I was away I got some knitting done on my new project.
After the Gatsby letdown, I've started designing a little sweater with my beloved Wool Cotton yarn.

Here is a humble little sketch (I'm no Fitz Henry Lane) --



It starts with about 5 inches in the King Charles Brocade stitch pattern. I like the different diamond motifs in various stitch patterns in the Vogue Knitting book, and will be incorporating more diamonds in the rest of the sweater. I'm going to break the C. Rex though, and continue in seed stitch for most of the body of the sweater.

I put in a knitted-in hem, and that was fabulous. It was a bit tricky knitting it up while following the stitch pattern, but I went slowly and it worked out nicely. I love the clean finish of the knitted up hem. I put a hem in my saddle-shoulder sweater, but I didn't love sewing it up and I think I tugged it off center a bit. The knit-up hem solves all of that.

Heart Hat

I made this heart hat, for the July book in Knit the Classics, Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I loved that book. Probably never would have picked it up on my own, but that's part of what's so cool about a book club, that you end up reading (and appreciating) things outside your normal purview.





Anyway, the hat is from Zimmerman's Knitting Workshop (p.156). The heart is worked first and then stitches picked up all around and knitted down to form the bonnet part. It's done entirely in garter stitch except for an I-cord border & ties. This was made with various materials I had on hand. The heart is some fuchsia washable wool, the grey bonnet part is Paton's merino, and the I-cord cast-off border and ties are also a wool-blend worsted weight that I happened to have hanging around. I also crocheted a line of pink around the edge when it was finished to get some more pink in there as a balance.

Vive la silliness!

Am I really that big? Um, no.

One of the things that interests me about fashion is how the cut of the clothes and the drape of the material alter the appearance of the body. When a well-designed piece of clothing, whether knitted or made from woven cloth, is on the body it feels like part of you. An extension. I think about a scene at the beginning of the novel Franny and Zooey when a girl is getting off the train to meet her boyfriend and he is happy to see her (they've been apart for a while) and he's kissing her passionately all over her face and then he starts kissing her coat, too, because she wears it so often and it's so familiar that it seems like a part of her. Clothing that really works does start to feel like it's part of you in that way. The clothes I love the most are those pieces that make me feel like I have fur. I am a cat and my sweater/jacket/jeans/shoes/etc. fit me like my shiny, well-groomed coat of shiny fur.



It's not about showing off the body for sex appeal or covering it up to hide its aspects. The right clothes are comfortable in a way that has nothing to do with elastic waistbands or even the softness of silk and cashmere. They cover without overcovering, they reveal without overrevealing. The color illuminates the skin and draws the eye without overpowering. A well-designed item will always make you feel like you look nice and won't trigger any body-image neurosis no matter what your size. I have some "fat" clothes from when I weighed 20 pounds more than I do now that I felt just as good in as some of my "thin" clothes; and some of my "superthin" clothes from the old college days made me feel like crap even when I was as skinny as a rail.

When I find a piece of clothing that is really perfect in a store there is an immediate kinesthetic recognition and I am willing to pay almost anything (within the realistic boundaries of middle-class life --I do live in NYC, after all, where you can buy a handbag that costs more than a car). The dream of sewing and making one's own clothes is that every garment will be like this, but the frustrating reality, for me anyway, is that the creative process involves a large part of trial & error and miscalculation, as well as a sort of Mystery of creation wherein the process itself takes on a kind of purpose leading to directions I can't always forsee. In my twenty-some-odd years of sewing and almost 3 years of knitting, I've probably made about five garments that really live up to the ideal I describe. Most of the time the clothes I make and buy are serviceable and have some excellent qualities but are not truly perfect. And honestly, I don't think it's realistic to expect perfection all the time in life. But -- as a perfectionist I kind of can't help it.

Thus, an outlook of perpetual disappointment interrupted by moments of excessively pleased surprise.

I started a dress last weekend using a simple 1960's vintage pattern.



I bought a whole collection of old patterns at a flea-market in Kansas a few years ago and I never really got around to experimenting with them because they are smaller than my size and I knew that I would have to resize them. Which I can do. But that can seem like just a bit too much bother on a busy weekend. Anyone who shops knows that sizing is a subjective thing and anyone who sews knows that sizes on commercial patterns are not numbered the same as patterns in stores at the mall. I wear a size 10 at Banana Republic and my sewing size is a 14.

But sizes also change over time as bodies and marketing and styles change. Looking at the measurements on the back of my vintage dress pattern I was sure I had to add a good inch to inch and a half to the width of my dress and dutifully resized the pattern before cutting it out. I'm making this one out of an inexpensive, light cotton fabric I got in my neighborhood and am using it also as a kind of "muslin" to test the pattern out because I think it could make a decent work dress out of a nice soft wool. So this is low stakes. And the pattern design is dead simple -- a sheath dress with only a couple of darts, so the resizing was hardly onerous.

It looked really big as I was cutting it out and I reminded myself that dresses always look bigger than you think when the pattern is laid out flat, before it has its darts and shaping, before the seam allowances are turned in. I put in my zipper and seamed the shoulders and collar and then basted the side seams and tried it on. And it was like wearing a huge, purple and embroidered trash bag.

So I learned that in the 1960s clothes had more ease built into them and I would have been a size 10 or 12 back then to get the look on the pattern illustration. Nice. I am finishing the dress today and I think it will be cute in the end. Right now it looks like a big, awful, matronly housecoat, so use your imagination...



Meanwhile, I completed the ribbed section of my Gatsby Girl sweater and started swatching for the lace section. It looked really small. But I reminded myself of how sweaters always look smaller on the needles, and ribbing, especially, stretches sooooo much. I took the sweater off the needles and put it on waste yarn and tried it on. I've spent a couple of weeks now taking out the sweater periodically from my knitting bag and trying it on, looking at it in the mirror, tugging and fussing and trying to convince myself that it will hang right when it's blocked. Truly, though, the reality is that it's somehow both tight and bulky at the same time. The ribbing pulls in to hug the body like a sausage casing, but the loft of the wool and texture of the ribbing puffs the sweater up at the same time, accentuating the curve of the stomach area. No thanks.

I've come to the conclusion, ultimately, that Gatsby will never really fit me in a way that will make me feel at home in it. I have been through the neurotic cycle of crafting guilt and deluded optimism enough times now to recognize the signs of something that's just not quite working. I'm ready now to admit this about Gatsby. No matter how pretty it is when it's done, and how lovely the workmanship is, and how many times I show off my pretty increases and decreases and the perfect little cables to my friends . . . I am never going to wear this.

But they always say that creation comes from destruction, right? I started swatching for a sweater of my own design this morning, using the Gatsby yarn which I do absolutely love without any doubts or reservations. Here is is all soggy on the towel. This yarn deserves something beautiful that makes me feel like a cat at home in my fur when I wear it.

Christmas in July

I've been working on Christmas presents. Here's a smidge of one that I finished up today.



That's all I'm saying about it until 12/26.

Fanny Pack

I made a "Fanny" pack as a project for Knit the Classics. I have had it in my mind for a while to attempt making a fanny pack that would somehow defy the horrible dorkiness of the genre. I like to go on walks myself and hate always carrying a purse, so I'm hopeful this will be useful for keys and a little cash in my own perambulations ;-)

I also have been musing about ways to integrate sewing and knitting and wanted to try it out with a small, simple project. I have this sweater/jacket with bulky knitted ribbing in my mind, but I'm not ready to go there yet.

Here are two shots of the pack, one laid flat and the other on my own behind.





I didn't have a pattern for this, but it is extremely simple -- just some rectangles folded over to make a flap. The pack is lined with a floral satin fabric. I left a hole on either side of the pouch and slid a strap through to hold it on the body. It's got a plastic clasp on the other side. The knitted element is just a twisted rib in a pale blue cotton yarn I had on hand, the button is antique and pleasantly splotchy, and the anchor is one of those iron-on patches.

Awww

A few firsts here:

- first baby clothing item
- first lace knitting
- first orange yarn!



This little sweater has been all over town lately, but I still like them whenever I see them.

Not bad, I must say, and I hope the little one will like it when she arrives. This is for my dear friends in Argentina who are expecting little Ana in a few short days. Better get it in the mail.

I have no idea how big newborns are, but this aint so bad when it's oversized, either. As demonstrated by the Bowdoin Bear...



Pattern: February Baby Sweater from Zimmerman's KNITTER'S ALMANAC
Yarn: 3 balls of KnitPicks Swish Superwash in light coral

Tank(ed?)

Okay, here is the finished tank top. These photos are particularly bad today, even by regular camera-phone standards. Okay, it's on the (long) list of stuff to buy when I'm employed again.





I do this thing sometimes, especially when I have a beautiful crafting friend who has a different style from me. I fall in love with a different kind of color, or pattern, or fiber, and I acquire that material, whatever and however that may be, and I listen to that fiber and make something very well suited to it's nature. Then, when it's made, I try it on... and I get that *feeling* where I just know that although I love this item, it really doesn't belong to me in that velveteen rabbit sort of sense. It belongs to itself, or to my friend whose style I'm temporarily emulating, or some movie star or something, but it's just downright not my style and I've got to admit that sometime or other.

Well. I can kind of picture wearing this tank top with a certain linen skirt that I've had the pattern and fabric for since 2001...And that's a whole other crafter's delusionary thinking for another day --

Two halves -- not quite whole

I've finished the second half of my tank top and will be sewing it up soon. Still not sure what I am going to wear this with...



Funny, I hadn't noticed how the brown color sort of pooled in the upper left side there. I guess that will be the back!

Geometric skirt

On a recent browsing of my local, Queens fabric store I came across a compellingly strange remnant. I couldn't decide if it was hideous or awesome and am now leaning toward hideously awesome. I made it up into a quick, A-line, summer skirt.



To all outward appearances, the fabric is a cotton/poly brocade.
Pattern is based on New Look 6843, though I reshaped the side seams and deleted the front darts.

Making this skirt has renewed my appreciation for technology. I heard a radio program recently about how devices such as phones and cameras and mp3's and the like are marketed with tons of features that people think they want but then become overwhelmed by the directions and can't figure out how to use. The program was about the divide between what we think we want (complex) and what we really want (simple). Well, I fished out the users manual for my cell phone, turned to page 180 (out of 248!) and figured out how to use the timer on the camera setting. The trickiest part was balancing the thing inside a drinking glass propped up with two eyeshadows and a pad of post-its as a makeshift tripod to elevate the viewfinder to human being height.

In this photo you can sort of see the flat felled seam. I put those in because the seam allowances were scratchy where the stiff polyester contrast threads stuck out(!)



Making this skirt also renewed my little love affair with my sewing machine. I finally replaced my old 1972 Singer See & Sew machine, much loved, with a Bernina Patchwork about 3 years ago. I bought this machine because it made beautiful buttonholes and my old zigzag stitch buttonholes made on the Singer were always crappy and made my beautiful suits and dresses (I used to sew more before discovering knitting) look like dorky home-ec projects. This fabric was super easy to work with and when I put in one single gorgeous buttonhole in the back I just had to sigh over the prettiness of it and take a photo.



Isn't that lovely?

The Mulberry Bush

Round and round I go.



Mostly on the train now, while, ironically, smaller projects remain at home.

I have been thinking about something very radical lately -- finishing Gatsby with a vertical split neck instead of a crew shape.

Cupcake

A very sweet person was here recently for an overnight and sent me a gift subscription to Interweave in thanks. This person was really too sweet for words to think of doing such a thing, and has a little thank you from me headed her way.



I've been having lots of fun with One Skein

Half a tank

Just finished the first half of my summer tank, and it's looking good. I was a little worried that I would run out of yarn, but I finished the first half with about an inch-round ball of yarn to go. With the One-Skein tank as my inspiration, this will seam up the middle of the front and back, so the scoop in the center of this half is the armhole, not the neck.



One more to go!