Every day this week I’ve woken up feeling like that drugged kid David post-dental surgery; “Is this real life?! Is this really happening?!” I would probably only be slightly less surprised if I wake up tomorrow morning to find I’ve turned into a giant cockroach.

THAT PICTURE WAS FIVE DAYS AGO AND I’M ONLY GETTING BIGGER, PEOPLE.

The mind boggles. Ah, well, knitting. At least there’s knitting.

Seth-the-unwilling-blogger has taken up the needles once again and is about halfway through a pretty sweet-looking Baby Surprise Jacket for my recalcitrant critter:

I don’t have a huge amount to say about it, since it’s not my project, other than we’re both sort of baffled by it and are relying on our faith in Elizabeth Zimmermann to see it through to a finished sweater. Right now it looks like some sort of weird logic puzzle for sheep. At any rate, the Noro Silk Garden yarn in #246 is freakishly gorgeous and I am almost sort of jealous of the feto for getting such a lovely sweater when he or she doesn’t even have the decency to, uh, show up within a reasonable timeframe.

My own knitting is less interesting, but I’m trucking along here and there when I’m not sneaking in a few rows on Seth’s project. (The Noro! It’s so cracktastic!) First up is the no-longer-a-baby-blanket blanket I started back when I was waiting for Baby #1 to hatch:

As you can see with my giant 13 pound cat in there for scale, it’s long gotten past the point of being a baby blanket, but honestly, I like having the mindless knitting available at hand so much that I just haven’t wanted to stop working on it. I still have 1.5 balls of Paton’s Classic Wool Merino in my stash, at which point I will have to call it a day (er, year or two) and cast off, but in the meantime I’m just not ready to let go.

And as always, there’s a soaker:

As you can see, I decided to try making one with steeks instead of actually shaping legholes and whatnot. Basically I made a sack and then set up steeks for where I wanted the legholes to be. Since taking these photos I’ve cut the steeks and started knitting the leghole ribbing. The size and shape of this soaker are pretty ridiculously wrong, but I think it works in terms of being a proof-of-concept sort of thing. It seems to be entirely possible to make a good soaker this way, and hey, if my kid is still in diapers in the 3rd grade, well, I’ll have a soaker for that.

I have to say, I still get a major thrill from looking at steeks. SHAPING BE DAMNED; I WILL CUT YOU!

I think I might actually finally be fortunate enough to say that I’m in a good enough place with my baby butt wardrobe that I can take some time off from making soakers and maybe make a project or two I’m more interested in knitting. My dear friend Margie has taken a huge chunk of her valuable knitting time this year to create FOUR SOAKERS for my kids’ butt wardrobe, in addition to the cute little pants-and-hat set she made for Eve when she was still in utero. I feel superlatively blessed to have such a badass knitter in my life. <3

First up, mittens for my husband! It’s currently Ass Cold in New England; our first bitterly cold snap of the season, really, and I realized this weekend that my poor husband who goes to work at stupid-early in the morning was doing so bare-handed. I’m using Michelle Porter’s Easy Basic Mitten pattern to make him some stripey, bulky orange-and-green hand protection:

Detailed project details are this way. Seth’s hand circumference matches the pattern as written, so the only mods so far are that I’m lengthening it to accommodate his long man-fingers, although I am fudging row counts to get the 4-row stripes to fit in evenly. I have some plans to crunch numbers to make the thumb gusset on mitten #2 fall on the opposite side of the mitten, so the stripe jogs mirror each other. (I’ve been trying to do jogless stripes, but when you’re working with such big stitches it’s really hard to fool the eye completely.)

And…I’m making the kiddo another soaker. I’m knitting the LPB on size 8 needles for this, which is resulting in a totally dense bulletproof fabric I think will work great for stopping leaks. Eve’s fitted-style cloth diapers are Crickett’s in Toddler+, which work great, but with the doubler insert they make her butt huge, and the soakers required to cover such an area are rather epic indeed. At the rate she’s growing I only have a few left that fit over her diapers. The lady at my LYS on Sunday (I was in there because I ran out of black yarn) saw my soaker-in-progress asked me if I was going to felt it. ::snort:: If this thing ever does get felted I think I could use it as building material.

After this soaker is done I’m going to try and make a pair of longies out of a recycled wool sweater. I have the sewing skills of a cavewoman, but honestly, I really need a break from knitting all these damn butt sweaters.

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.

It only took me, uh, two weeks to get that right cuff taken care of. I hope to finish the left cuff before the kiddo’s out of diapers altogether.

What else have I been up to? After apparently missing Fiber Twist again this year, Eve and I made it out to Webs for Ysolda Teague’s trunk show. Eve was very excited about the walls of yarn:

She was also really into Ysolda’s talk. Or at least, trying to go through everyone’s knitting bag during Ysolda’s talk. Also, she was so excited to be there she pooped right in the middle of it, so that photo above is the only one I ended up taking. Ah, well. I will tell you that I had sort of a religious knit-appreciation experience looking at the seamless set-in shoulders on the red Vivian sample. Damn, that girl can knit! So inspiring!

Last weekend the family trooped down to Rhinebeck for the NY State Sheep & Wool Festival, which is a lot closer to home than I remembered. I think the last time we went we drove down from the cabin upstate; this year we drove from home and it was only two hours, the middle of which we punctuated with a scenic cut through Stockbridge and Great Barrington on our way to the Taconic parkway from the Mass Pike.

I did a lot of yarn shopping but ended up not purchasing anything because I left my wallet in the car. I am such a dumbass. That aside, it was awesome to meet some of the Ravelry crew in person! Eve’s festival highlight was meeting Bob:

(photo via Ravelry Jess–she took the best one!)

For real, I’m pretty sure Bobsolda was the most exciting thing Eve’s ever seen. She loves doggies, she loves wool, and OMG A HUGE DOGGIE MADE OF WOOL?!! OBVIOUSLY THE MOST EXCITING THING EVER. My only regret is being unable to book Bobsolda for Eve’s 1st birthday party tomorrow. There is no way I can ever hope to top Giant Bob of Squishy Wool Love.

Speaking of Eve’s birthday, she’s turning one year old today! Her cupcake-and-pizza party is tomorrow; in the meantime we’ll be celebrating with a round of bloodwork and vaccinations at the pediatrician’s office later today. (Poor kid!) I’m hoping to make it up to her with her favorite purple ice cream. Sadly, I will have no Bob.

I had been trucking along, happily finishing the second sleeve of ye olde baby shrug, when I noticed I’d miscounted rows when I added my fancy little twisted stitch. The cuffs don’t line up, and I need to rip it out and reknit it. It’s a tiny little error, but on the scale of a baby garment it’s really noticeable.

After the cuff drama on the baby shrug, I went home and picked up the Epic Blanket of Mindless Knitting. Oh, Epic Blanket of Mindless Knitting. I love this project so much. It’s like an old friend, or a pair of comfortable old shoes. I’ve gotten into such a good groove with it I was able to work on it while watching House in the dark. I have never been this comfortable with a knitting project in my life. This WIP and I, we’re practically at the point of farting in front of each other without comment.

I’ve got all sorts of other stressful stuff going on. Mostly good stress, some WHOLLY AWESOME stress, and a small slice of bad stress. It’s so nice to be able to occasionally sit down and knit my own security blanket. ♥

I’m using Cascade 220 Superwash for the first time and I’m really liking it. It’s SO MUCH SOFTER than regular Cascade 220. Right after I bought this skein at my LYS (Mt. Laurel Yarns in Sturbridge, MA) it showed up 30% off at Webs, but I like it so much I’m not going to complain.

I did run into one roadblock–according to the pattern, “any worsted weight yarn” is fine, but C220 is way too skinny to knit up nicely at 4 stitches per inch. I much preferred the swatch I knit up at 5.5 stitches per inch, so I ended up crunching the numbers and rewriting the pattern for a finer gauge. It was an interesting exercise, and I’m glad I took the time to do it. I like the fabric I’m knitting, and I am enthused about the prospect of (maybe?) getting it right the first time.

In other news, I made a trip out to Webs on Saturday for my April foray into the 35th anniversary sale. I’ll post photos of my haul very soon. In the meantime I am quietly living with the shame of having become somehow physically unable to leave the store without an entire bag of Noro. (No, really. This is the third trip in a row.)

The Waiting for Baby blanket continues, albeit very slowly as the only time I ever get to knit anything is 2 hours a week on Tuesday mornings, when I go to my knitting group full of other people who want to hold the baby.

Everyone thinks it’s a hat.  It’s not a hat.

One very neat thing about this project is that it’s grown to the point that it can serve as its own knitting bag:

Now that, uh, five months have gone by, I’ve finally hauled my spinning wheel out of its coat-closet sabbatical and set it up next to my work computer. (When I’m not babywrangling or thinking about yarn, I work at home doing random webby things.)

I’ve actually been getting a lot of spinning done.  Curiously enough, it’s easy to pick up and spin for a minute or two between work tasks.  I am kicking myself for not realizing this sooner.

This spin is boring as all get out, but I feel like this is a very good exercise for me.   Spinning plain white roving lets you tune out the qualities of the fiber and just zone out on the actual spinning of it.

You’ll notice from the photo that at one point a couple of years ago I had a bout of paranoia in which  I labeled all of my bobbins on the “TOP” and “BOTTOM” because I thought if I put a half-spun bobbin on the wheel in the wrong direction it would mess up my yarn.  I have since realized this is not true, and feel sort of silly about it now.

This yarn I am spinning will be my first true three-ply.  I know, the last time I mentioned this yarn I was planning for it to be a two-ply.  But in the meantime, I found my fourth Majacraft bobbin!  w00t, as the kids say!

Anyhow, since I’ll be plying three singles together, I’m thinking it might be time to upgrade my ghetto handmade needles-poked-through-a-Corona-box setup to a real actual Lazy Kate when I eventually finish spinning the third bobbin of this stuff.  Considering I started spinning this yarn last summer, I’m hoping to buy it sometime before the end of the year.  

I LOVE this bunny. I’m making it for someone else, but I’m glad I bought enough yarn to make one for my own baby as well. I really like working with Lamb’s Pride Bulky. I’m using #9 needles and I’m enthused about the dense/sturdy results. It seems like a teething baby could definitely chew the hell out of this fabric, with nominal wear and tear.

Since I haven’t much else to write about, here’s a photo of my Tuesday morning knitting group:

Well, (some of) their laps, anyhow. I just started going about a month ago, and I really love what’s it’s doing for my knitting. I find I’m a lot more productive and keen on finishing things when I have a knitting-related event to show up for once a week. If I’m knitting in a void I tend to let things languish in drawers and never finish them. But I’ve been doing really well lately! Thanks, Other Local Knitters!

In other news, I am still Wicked Pregnant:

11 days to D-day. Not that I’m counting or anything…