The scarf is huge–it looks to be just under a foot wide, and is plenty long enough for his 6′8″ frame. I gave him this scarf, for his birthday, I think, in July of 2000. When I saw it today I couldn’t believe he still had it, although upon further reflection it makes total sense. Dude never throws anything away, ever, and his estate will be the stuff of comic book and pro-wrestling collector fantasy.

This scarf is pretty embarrassing in terms of knitting quality: I was such a bad knitter that when I ran out of yarn while binding off, I finished binding off with a random gray yarn rather than unknitting a row and then binding off. I vaguely remember being afraid that if I tried to go back I would mess everything up and unravel the entire scarf. Which, given my knitting skills at the time, probably wasn’t all that unrealistic of a fear.

That being said, it was still pretty amazing to see this thing in action today. Someday I’ll have to knit him something a bit more impressive, but in the meantime it’s nice to see something I made so early in my knitting career is still keeping someone warm.

Here’s one more picture of him playing with our daughter this morning, who also happened to be sporting a handknit sweater:

Gotta love a well-dressed family!

The pattern is Alberta by Jared Flood, Raveled over here.

The knitting part of this project went pretty smoothly. I used TECHknitter’s tutorial for traveling jogless stripes to get the striping to look nice and neat. The only major gaffe I had was the first armhole–the instructions say to slide 12 stitches onto waste yarn and then to keep knitting on the other side, so that’s what I did. I should have broken the yarn and joined it again on the other side, however. I ended up doing a sort of messy fix involving a knot or two in the armpit area. You can’t tell on the finished sweater, but I was totally sweating the finished product for a while.

The steeking for the neck and armholes was a crazy-stressful yet ultimately exhilarating learning experience for me. I studied Eunny Jang’s steeking chronicles religiously for several days, and made a couple of rows of practice steeks on my gauge swatch to get into the swing of things.

It seems the longest part of this project was picking up all those stitches for the ribbing around the arm and neckholes. I would guess the total area of stitch picking up is 2 to 3 feet of length when it’s all said and done. The designer’s recommended tubular bind off took a long time too, but I felt it was a good learning experience and the extra effort in the finishing department really took things to the next level and made the project look extra special.

This is the video tutorial I found on YouTube that I used to learn the tubular bind off:

It’s by Deb at Beautiful Knitting, and like all of her knitting videos, it was *so* well done–good image and sound quality, just the right pace, and the instructions were very easy to follow. I hope she does a lot more videos in the future.

The last thing I have to say about knitting this pattern isn’t really about the pattern itself so much as the format it’s available in–I found having to go out and track down a paper copy of back issue of a magazine to be a huge pain in the butt, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t really, really want to knit this particular pattern. Wild Fibers Magazine is a beautiful magazine, and I didn’t mind buying an issue, but I would have happily paid the same amount of money for the convenience of a PDF download. I noticed I was only the 41st person on Ravelry to knit this pattern; I think a lot more people out there would give it a go if the pattern were available electronically.

Butt Knits

In my last entry I mentioned being thisclose to done on my Ecological Wool soaker.   I’ve long since finished it.  Here it is, in action:

As I mentioned on Flickr, (way back in October when I finished the thing,)  I generally like to post in-use photos of my finished knits, but I think I’m going to stop doing this for my daughter’s butt knits.  I know she’s still quite small but it does feel sort of weird to take pictures of her butt for the Internet.

My final verdict on Cascade Ecological Wool for soaker knitting is a mixed one. Ecological wool is ostensibly a heavy-worsted to light-bulky weight yarn, but it’s spun so it’s light and lofty. I had to knit it much tighter than the recommended gauge to get a suitably dense fabric to act as a waterproof barrier for cloth diapering. That being said, I love my finished soaker. As time-consuming and inconvenient it was to knit with size 3 and 5 needles, the resulting fabric is perfect, will wear like iron, and I’ve got a soaker that should work for my kid through potty training.

That being said, I have a second kid on the way, and with two kids in diapers at the same time, I need a lot more soakers, and I need to make them much more quickly. My next butt knitting project is going to be knit with Lamb’s Pride Bulky, and will probably involve steeks so as to simplify the knitting process.

From Vestvember to Vestcember, and even on to Vestuary

After I finished the Epic Ecological Wool Soaker, I decided it was high time to knit something for my husband.  (After two years of marriage, I could no longer hide behind the curse of the boyfriend sweater!)  We’re both fans of Jared Flood (and more generally, dudes in sweater vests) so when I saw the Alberta vest pattern I knew it was perfect for him.  Then I heard about Vestvember on that there Internet, which really sealed the deal, so we took a field trip to Webs that weekend to pick out yarn for the project.

I already had a bag of Noro Kureyon in a discontinued colorway (#199) marinating in my stash that Seth really liked, so we decided to pick a solid color for the body and the ribbing and use Noro for the stripes.  We ended up going with Lambs Pride Worsted in Chocolate Souffle, because it was a good match for Kureyon in terms of weight and fiber, and the color looked good with all those random brights and subtle greens in the Noro.  The Noro was so busy, too, that we decided to do the ribbing in Chocolate Souffle as well, to keep the non-Noro colors subdued and perhaps lend some restraint and avoid the whole Noro Clown Vomit effect.

This photo here was taken with a flash and isn’t a really good representation of the brown–it’s really more of a richly deep, almost black color.  It looks a lot better in natural lighting, I promise.

This project was a big challenge for me in more ways than one–in addition to trying to knit jogless stripes in the round for the first time, it involved STEEKS.   STEEKS, which in time I will eventually be able to type in lowercase letters, are strategic cuts in your knitting  (really, CUTS!  LIKE, WITH SCISSORS!)  to allow for things like armholes, neckholes, and cardigan openings to come into being without actually knitting them as you go.  The vest was basically a conical tube, which I subsequently sliced open to create places for Seth’s head and arms to go.    I took a whole mess of photos documenting my STEEK process, which I will upload sometime in the near future, as the process really warrants its own blog entry.  In the meantime, I will say that Eunny Jang’s Steeking Chronicles were an invaluable resource.  Here’s a photo of my sliced-open gauge swatch, which I used for practice STEEKS before moving on to the vest:

I went with the crochet-stabilized method, obviously. Worked like a charm, despite my being a total crochet idiot. (More on this later, along with photos of the teeny-tiny scissors I bought to cut open the vest steeks.)

New Baby Prep

Lamb The Second, who we are still calling Flipper despite our rumored better judgment, is cooking along satisfactorily. Here’s a photo circa October:

Being pregnant while chasing around a very active older baby is waay harder than I thought it would be. My daughter isn’t walking yet, and so still needs to be carried in and out of buildings and up and down all the copious stairs in my living space. (All 25 pounds of her!) As hard as it was to parent my daughter during the first trimester epic exhaustion phase, this third trimester is physically kicking my ass in ways I didn’t anticipate. That being said, I feel like we’ve hit a good stride together lately in terms of my taking care of her well and keeping her happy, so I’m trying to enjoy the easy groove of these last few weeks of being alone together before our daytimes turn into a party of three.

As part of my new-baby prep I am trying to clean out what was once supposed to be my “craft” room but never really evolved from my Boxes of Fiber Crap area. I never have time to spin yarn anymore and probably won’t for the foreseeable future, so I’ve been sorting through my spinning stash and separating out various fibers that go well together. About two weeks ago I drove down to Still River Mill (less than 20 minutes from my house!) and met up with Deirdre to give her a giant bag of white wool from the stash. Sometime this spring I’ll go back and retrieve several pounds of bulky weight polypay-merino blend yarn, which I often like to fantasize about knitting into a Sylvi.

I’m still slowly delving into my fiber collection. I’ve got a bunch of gorgeous natural brown romney wool and alpaca fibers sorted out, and I plan to throw some varied green merino and alpaca fibers into the mix to get a heathered brown and green yarn, probably in worsted weight. As sad as I am to retire the drum carder, dyepot and spinning wheel for the time being it’s fun to sort through what I have and dream about being a commercial yarn designer.

Potential Guest Blogger?

My husband Seth did some really impressive knitting recently.

Don’t you think this project warrants some blogging? I already know all the project details but I’m still dying for him to blog about it.

I am going to try to wrestle a few paragraphs out of him this weekend if at all possible.

The knitting front hasn’t been nearly as productive as I’d like. Babywrangling has kept me very busy this summer. However, I managed to not fall asleep immediately upon getting the kiddo to bed enough times to finish my Liesl:

Not without a lot of headaches, however. First of all, I hated the yarn. Hated! The Yarn! It was truly terrible. I wanted a cotton sweater to wear over summer dresses, which makes sense except for the fact that I hate knitting with cotton. Hate it! I don’t know why I was incapable for remembering this until it was too late.

Speaking of problems noticed too late, you’ll notice the neckline of my Liesl is different than the pattern. While I think the pattern mod is pretty and it definitely came out looking a lot better than I thought it would, I didn’t go into the knitting process planning for it. Oh, no. What actually happened is that I made a mistake lining up the pattern stitches in the yoke of the sweater and I didn’t notice it until i was 3/4ths of the way done.

Had I been knitting with a yarn that didn’t make me hate life, I would have frogged the whole thing and started again. However, I decided I wasn’t going to do any more cotton knitting than absolutely necessary, and I had COME TOO FAR to turn back at that point. I finished the sweater, and let the mistake lie.

I tried to be okay with the sweater at that point. Really, if you weren’t a Ysolda fan you probably wouldn’t have noticed the issue. It was small. However, it was there, and I am far too anal retentive for my own good.

So. Sweater surgery. I threaded a yarn needle with fingering weight junk yarn and went back and inserted a lifeline through a plain knit row between pattern repeats, just below the mistake in the yoke. And then, I cut off the yoke entirely. With a big pair of scissors. I was determined. The yoke needed to die. it was a gory, messy process, with little bits of cotton yarn flying everywhere.

With the yoke finally gone and all the residual yarn bits removed, I picked up the stitches from my lifeline and added a plain 5 row garter stitch neckline. I added the eyelet row in the middle both as a decorative element and so I could adjust the size of the neckline into something that wouldn’t slide off my shoulders.

Isn’t it a beautiful sweater? I’m totally into it:

The weather turned chilly before I got a chance to wear it, but I’m looking forward to enjoying it next summer.

Here’s the other reason I haven’t been very productive lately:

I’ve got a cashew on the way! Well, I’ve got another ultrasound in two weeks, at which point I’m hoping to see something more baby-like and less bean-shaped. We’re looking forward to a fully cooked human arriving sometime in early March.

In the meantime, I’m back to soaker knitting, because two little ones in diapers at the same time is a lot of diapering.

I’m doing that one in Cascade Ecological Wool, which is a yarn I absolutely love but I’m not sure it’s bulky enough for what I want in a soaker fabric. It looks very bulky in the skein but it’s light and airy. I want to do a pair of longies in the purple Eco+ I have, but I’m thinking I might knit them with the yarn held double. I’ve gotten down to the body of that soaker since I took the above photo, and I’m using size 5 needles to get the fabric density I’m looking for.

I’m also working on the epic blanket of mindless knitting here and there, but it’s sort of in the background right now. I like working on it when I’m too tired to do anything requiring thought.

I’m hoping to squeeze in a pair of Veyla mitts at some point soon. I bought some sexy sexy baby alpaca + silk yarn for them on Wednesday:

I don’t have any buttons yet but I’m having a fun time thinking about them. I love buttons.

Oh, one more thing: I found a better photo of the Emporio Armani dress I drooled over in my last post:

I love it. And someday, twenty years from now, I will totally knit myself a cabled dress. In the meantime, I was thinking it might be cool to try to knit one for the kiddo. She’s much smaller than me and requires much less shaping.

Anyhow, that’s it for me. I hope to update this a bit more frequently in the future, but with mommy-type responsibilities it might be a while.

It’s the Confection Baby Shrug, although I did some number crunching in order to knit this up with Cascade 220 Superwash, which is a much finer gauge of yarn than the pattern calls for. I’m really glad I took the time to do the math, because the resulting garment is much lighter and seasonally-appropriate.

The finished shrug is too big and doesn’t fit yet, but I took a couple of shrug-modeling shots with the baby anyhow:

I’m thinking she’ll be able to start wearing it sometime this fall, hopefully right when the weather turns. I’m looking forward to it!

Both the new baby and the bunny came out fabulously, and my cousin recently posted some photos of them together:

They look happy together, don’t you think?

On the knitting front, there’s not much else to report. I’m a halfway through the first sleeve of my Confection baby shrug, and the Endless Baby Blanket is nearing 50% completion, having gone through two full balls of Paton’s classic wool merino.

I did end up buying three skeins of the super cheap Cascade Eco+ closeout at Webs. I ended up ordering it online and paying for shipping, however, so it didn’t feel like such a crazy deal. (I live an hour away from the warehouse/store in Northampton, so I always go in person. But I wanted to skip the journey out to western Massachusetts with the baby, so I ordered in this time.)

The muted lilac color looks great in person, and the wool is nice and soft. I’m looking forward to working with it someday, if I ever finish either of my two current projects. The baby is time consuming and I don’t actually get to knit all that much. She’s damn cute, though:

I knit these about a month before my wedding a couple years ago. The yarn was Yemalia and Carnival Curio from Liz Stottlemyer.

I didn’t use a pattern, and actually, it’s been so long now that I’m not quite sure exactly how I made them. I remember I did a sort of exaggerated garter theme, knitting three rounds, purling three rounds, etc. But all of the other details are lost in the planning-my-wedding fog that was Summer of ‘07. Didn’t they come out cute, though?

I am tickled magenta about this whole having-an-audience thing, as I have previously operated under the assumption that there is absolutely no one reading this blog.  So hello, magnificent seven.  Glorious, wonderful seven.  I hope none of you are that creepy guy from California who used to fedex random shit to my house.

In knitting news, I am still loving my Tuesday Morning Knitting Group. (TMKG.)  The Lamb and I have been attending on a regular basis and it’s just grand.    I get free hands to knit for two hours, and Eve gets universally admired by the Ladies Who Knit.   Work on the Waiting-for-Baby blanket continues, albeit slowly, and I try not to let all the admiration go to my daughter’s head.

Speaking of my TMKG, several of us are going to be exhibiting our knits as part of the Women’s History Month art exhibit at Jacob Edwards Library.  I’m contributing Eve’s Noro longies, as she’s recently outgrown them:

I have one other undocumented FO to share with you (all SEVEN! of you!):

I apologize for the poor quality of the photo.  The Good Camera is tucked away in the baby bag, next to the baby, and it’s my general MO to let sleeping babies lie.   Anyhow, much like my previous undocumented FO, my delightfully fat baby outgrew this before I finished knitting it.  I’m thinking I should stick to stuffed animals and toddler clothes for the duration of the year.  That is, if I manage to cast on anything in the first place.

However, she promptly outgrew it. I’m sending it off to her brand-spanking new cousin later this week. Happy 0th birthday, Baby Burgess!

I’m also about 50 stitches away from completing a third wool soaker, although I’m nearly certain she’s outgrown that as well. Anyone else see at pattern developing here?

The waiting-for-baby blanket, at least, is something she won’t outgrow so quickly. Although at this rate, it’s probably going to end up being a 1st birthday present.

I think maybe this is why older ladies love knitting for their grandchildren so much. As a new mom i am an infrequent and ineffectual knitter at best.

The Lamb was born on October 23, at 9:04 pm, weighing in at 7lbs 12.5oz, and measuring 19 inches long.

She’s utterly perfect. We are completely agog.

In baby knitting news, we realized when we got her home that all her hats were too small for her wee newborn head, so we made her a teeny hat right away. I’m working on a second teeny hat for her now, but it’s been slow going with the incessant nursing she’s doing. I need to figure out a way to knit and nurse at the same time.

The wool soakers I knit for her fit well and work perfectly. We love them. They’re much better than the PUL/plastic covers. We had her in a Thirsties cover for a day and a half at one point, but we noticed her butt was starting to get red. (The wool is breathable, so her butt is looking pretty great now.)

I will post a zillion baby-knitting photos eventually. In the meantime we’re sort of tied up with the getting-to-know you process. Taking care of a newborn is much harder work than I realized, especially the nursing.

News as it develops.