A Knotted Yarn

Setting Goals

2009-07-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

--And Helping Miriam Meet Hers

I’ve been thinking about the value of setting goals.

I was an awkward child who, whenever she could, stayed inside. I avoided team sports and team captains avoided me. When forced by PE teachers to run around the football field in high school I had a terrible cramp in my side and was last coming in. I hated exercise.

But about five years ago, inspired by a friend, I signed up to train for a marathon with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training. I agreed to raise $2,000 and they trained me for my first marathon. The tee shirts read,

“Think training for a marathon is tough? Try chemotherapy.”

I didn’t run. I walked. I finished my first marathon in 6-1/2 hours and felt great. Shortly afterwards the 14 year old leukemia patient in whose honor I had participated, lost his battle to leukemia. I signed up for a second marathon and raised another $2,000 in his memory. I didn’t think I could finish a marathon, didn’t think I could raise money, but I did both.

Setting a goal and meeting it gives such a sense of satisfaction. They don’t have to be big, life changing goals. Little goals set and met move me forward. I have two goals for the next months:

(1) I want to finish Level 1 of The Knitting Guild Of America’s Masters Class and send it in for review. I'm aiming for the end of the month. OK, the end of August.

(2) I want to run (well, walk/run) the Four Bridges Half Marathon at the end of October. The race has a 2 hour and 45 minute cut off time so I have to pick up my speed. I think I can do it if I start training now and really work at it.

And I want to help my youngest daughter, Miriam, meet a goal she has set for herself. With her mother’s encouragement, she joined Team In Training. Now she is the one raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Miriam is only 26. She is an 8th grade English teacher. Her friends are teachers, graduate students and others just setting out in a difficult economy. She’s selling bottled water, hosting a Silpada jewelry party, and appealing for donations. The funds are slow coming in and she’d sure appreciate your help. So would I. Clink here to go to her fund raising page and join us in the fight against leukemia and blood cancer.

A Felted Hat

2009-06-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Carolyn, who has many years experience as an avid and adventurous knitter, decided we should encourage the many beginners in our knitting group to move on from scarves. At her suggestion they agreed to knit Fiber Trends' Felt Hat. I knit one up quickly to show as a sample the next time we meet. I should have taken before and after pictures. Before felting I was pretty worried. But after felting I couldn't have been more pleased.

This is in Cascade 220. I have lots more Cascade 220 in various colors. I'll do this again and next time I'll knit in various bits of odds and ends. This could be addicting!

Musings On The Boat That Didn’t Sail

2009-05-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

We spent the long weekend with friends on their Catalina 42. Friday morning we left their berth at Marina Del Rey, sailed to Catalina and spent the weekend with those who had made a choice we had rejected.

We enjoyed wine and cheese on the outdoor patio of the Banning House, overlooking Cat Harbor, visiting with a couple who had spent eight years circumnavigating the globe. We listened to their stories of adventure, Christmas with the harbor master in Mexico, superb care in a hospital in Bangkok, getting caught in an eight mile wide fishing net and twenty six days crossing the Atlantic on their way home.

I felt envy rise in my breast. I wanted a boat. I wanted to sail around the world, or at least down to Mexico, Central America and through the canal. The cruising couple told us it needn’t be terribly expensive, that people cruise on lots of different budgets, some for as little as $200 a month. When they made the decision to go, they sold their house, kept only one car and didn’t buy anything for two years as they prepared for their trip.

“Let’s do it,” I thought.

Perhaps because he has done more sailing than I, my husband was more realistic,

“Sailing is a lot of work,” he said. “I have no interest in buying a boat.”

He thought differently thirty years ago. When we married we thought we would buy a sail boat and sail up and down the Pacific coast. We even talked about sailing around the world. Both of our fathers had sail boats. His father had a 29 foot Ericson sloop docked just blocks from their house in San Francisco. We crewed for him on day sails to Sausalito for lunch or to Angel Island for a picnic. My father had a bigger boat, a 42 foot sail boat he and my mother sailed to Alaska and talked about sailing around the globe. Eventually both fathers sold their boats. When my father-in-law sold his boat my husband thought about buying it. But responsibilities and limitations said no.

We could do it now. It’s not too late. But we won’t. Even as temptation rose inside, I knew it was not a choice we would make. I’d have to give up too many choices I’ve already made, I’d have to give up my weekly time with my grandchildren, my volunteer work with hospice patients. I’d have to give up my house, my sewing room, my office, my garden and my mother’s cats.

I didn’t know I was choosing not to sail around the world when I decided not to join my father-in-law in a Sunday afternoon sail around the bay years ago. I was only deciding to spend the afternoon doing something else. And somehow that decision that day joined with many others and today I’m not setting sail.

It is not regret I feel. My life is good and I’m grateful for my husband, my children and my grandchildren. They are my greatest satisfaction. I’m grateful for the career I had, the volunteer work I do that contribute to a sense of purpose in my life. I’m grateful for my friends and my hobbies that daily affirm me. No, it’s not regret I feel.

What I’m feeling is an awareness of my ever more limited choices. Forty years ago my life was all possibility with no limitation. I believed I had forever to do whatever I chose to do. And the possibilities were endless. I could study Russian or biology or English. I could go to law school or teach or be a flight attendant. I could marry or not, have children or not. I had no sense of limitation.

I’ve never been one to dither about my choices, to engage in paralyzing analysis about whether to do this or do that. I just go blithely forward with the choice made. Sometimes I’m not even conscious of the choice or its consequences when I make it. But today I am aware of limitation, aware that taking one choice precludes another, that time spent one way today cannot be spent another way tomorrow, and that each choice I make today affects the choices available to me tomorrow. I’m increasingly aware of my mortality.

A February Lady in Cotton

2009-05-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

This is my second February Lady Sweater. The first time I fussed over the pattern and made lots of notes about modifications I'd make if I were to knit it again. But when the time came to knit this one, I'd forgotten all my brilliant ideas. I did decide to add some extra stitches to the front for the overlapping bands. But that meant the pattern didn't work out just right under the sleeves. No matter, this is a very forgiving pattern. I fudged a little bit and all was well.

My new advice for this pattern: Don't sweat it. Just knit. It will be fine!

I made short sleeves because that's all the yarn I had. This is my first short sleeve cardigan and I've decided I like it.

Happy Mothers Day!

2009-05-10T07:42:00.001-07:00

My mother had a silk screen of the Brooklyn Bridge done by Wayne Thiebaud, very different from the work for which he later became famous. It was given to her in 1960 by coworkers at the Chico State library when we moved to Fresno. It hung over the sofa in the living room for forty five years.

She took it down to hang this, one of my first quilts. I liked the scrapiness of it and knew she would appreciate its earthtones. But it is an amateur’s work. Not all the points are sharp. Nor do they all meet. The quilting is mere wavy lines stitched across the front of the quilt. In fact, it embarrassed me a bit. She had friends who quilted, who would know this was the work of a beginner, and a beginner without much artistic talent. I urged her to put Thiebaud back up.

“I like it. I was tired of Thiebaud.”

She said she remembered the quilting frame set up once or twice a month in the parlor of her grandmother Ornbaum’s house and the ladies gathered to quilt. She showed me an old quilt her grandmother Ornbaum had made. It is beyond repair. I remember other quilts. We used them as moving blankets, wrapped them around the furniture. I remember a hand stitched multicolored wedding ring quilt frayed and tattered, perhaps one of those stitched in the Ornbaum parlor.

When my mother moved to a senior apartment, she sold or gave away the art work she had collected over her lifetime and took with her only pieces done by her daughters. I told her she should keep the quilt where she could wrap herself in it on the couch when she read, but she hung it on the wall.

“It’s not art, Momma,” I told her.

“I like it. It is too art.”

The quilt is in my house now. The golds have faded. Some of the red has washed into the browns. I didn’t hang it. I wrap myself in it when I sit on the couch.

Happy Mothers Day!

It's Not Just Beginners and Perfectionists Who Rip It Out and Start Over

2009-04-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

I sat next to a beginning knitter at knitting group last week. She was working on a baby blanket, graduating from simple stockinette, to a basket stitch. But although she knew how to knit and purl, she was off on her pattern and had at least an inch to unknit. In frustration, she ripped the whole thing out, even the inch and a half garter stitch border that was just fine. She was frustrated, maybe the blanket was too difficult for her, maybe she shouldn’t try to do a stitch pattern.

I told her I do a lot of unknitting. She expressed amazement. I wanted her to feel better, didn’t want her to give up on knitting, but I wasn’t exagerating. I do a lot of reknitting. I told her I frequently have to redo my starts. There’s something about getting started on a new piece or a new technique that requires me to knit, unknit and reknit several times before I get into the groove. I told her I make mistakes when I’m not focused on my knitting, that after our last knitting get together I went home and ripped out everything I did in group, two hours of knitting lost. Sometimes I’ll put a piece aside too long and not be able to pick it up again without a lot of mistakes. I make mistakes at the end of a piece, when I’m in a hurry to finish and start something new. I make mistakes when I’m trying to carry on a conversation, knit in the car, knit while watching television or listenning to an audio book. And I make mistakes when I’m trying too hard.

Sometimes I unknit because I lose track of where I am, sometimes I get sloppy and my tension is off, sometimes I’ll notice a split stitch several rows below and for some reason, especially if its lace, I can’t figure out how to drop down and fix it, so I unknit those rows instead.

I’ve learned not to fight it. I’ve learned to accept it as part of knitting, as what I need to do to get the results I want.

Often other knitters say when they find a mistake they just fudge it, no one will ever notice. But if I can see the mistake now, I’ll see it ever after. Better to fix it.

And that leads me to the Vine Vest I was knitting in Provence. I seamed it all up with the skills I learned in Margaret Fisher’s Perfect Seams class. The seams were beautiful. I added the edging. No problem. I put it on. Ugh! I ripped it all out and am knitting the yarn into a new February Lady Sweater. If I were a perfectionist, I would have soaked the kinks out of the yarn before reknitting.

Where have you been and what have you been doing?

2009-04-19T19:40:00.001-07:00

OK - It's been quite a while since I've posted. I intended to post, really I did. But...

I have two spring sweaters on the needles: a February Lady Sweater in Classic Elite's Provence and a lovely soft pink pullover in Rowan organic cotton. Both would be perfect for the beautiful weather we are having right now. But, I keep getting distracted by shawls:

Luna Moth Shawl

I purchased Black Water Abbey's organic fingering weight wool in ecru at Stitches West. Several vendors had the Luna Moth Pattern knitted up to show off their yarn. When I saw it knitted up, much prettier than it had appeared in pictures I had seen, I had to make it. It knit up quickly into an elegant shawl and will make a nice gift.

Here is a detail of the lace:

Evelyn Clark's Lace Leaf Shawl

This is a fast pattern I'll make again soon! It's in Misti Alpaca sport weight. Soft, cuddly and warm.

Stitches West!

2009-02-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

Swatches ready to go for Margaret Fisher's Perfect Seams class!

I have never been confident or satisfied with my seams. Hopefully that will change!

I'm taking my Vine Vest which has waited unseamed since last summer. I'm hoping to seam it up in my hotel room after the class. Then pick up and knit the edging and wear it this spring.

God reached into Himself and created her

2009-02-14T08:28:00.001-08:00

Caroline St. John Close

Born
October 18, 1925
Boonville, California

Died
January 29, 2009
Bakersfield, California

She asked that this hymn be sung at her funeral,

Hymn of Promise

In the bulb there is a flower
In the seed an apple tree.
In cocoons, a hidden promise.
Butterflies will soon be free!
In the cold and snow of winter,
There’s a spring that waits to be
Unrevealed until its season.
Something God alone can see.

-Natalie Sleeth, 1986

She was my mother and I ache to talk with her again.

Sigh of Relief

2009-01-21T08:43:00.002-08:00

I spent most of yesterday watching television, watching the inauguration and watching the crowds of people in Washington, D.C. and all over the world, watching and celebrating together.

Yesterday’s celebration followed a great big national sigh of relief. It would have been unseemly to cheer the departure of the 43rd president, to have shouted “good riddance” as his helicopter flew over the crowds on the Capitol Mall. And so we celebrated the incoming president instead.

The commentators seemed to think that what we were celebrating was our first black president. And, yes, that was a very important part of what we celebrating. On the day following what would have been Martin Luther King’s 80th birthday, in the presence of members of the Tuskegee Airmen who chose to fight for their country in a segregated military, of Congressman John Lewis who was almost beaten to death for his role in the civil rights movement, and thousands of others who believe in an ideal denied them only because of the color of their skin, a black man was inaugurated as president of the United States. It was a day many of us, black and white, did not expect to see in our lifetimes.

But to me, that Obama is African American, is symbolic of more. And his election promises more. If we can overcome our history of racism, we can overcome much more.

Yesterday came in a very dark hour. It came when it seemed our nation had lost its way, surrendered to fear and given into the intoxication of consumption. It seemed we had forgotten that our strength comes from justice and that what unites us as Americans is the common ideals codified in our constitution.

Yesterday we remembered who we are called to be. Yesterday we knew we could do better in all the ways we are challenged to do better.

Knitting with Sari Silk

2009-01-15T10:42:00.000-08:00

I sat for three quiet hours last night knitting a scarf from recycled sari silk. It wasn’t on my to-do list, wasn’t planned as a present for anyone, wasn’t practice intended to make me a more skillful knitter. I cast on and knit for the sheer pleasure of working with this yarn, of feeling its softness with my fingers and watching its unexpected colors reveal themselves in the scarf flowing from my needles.

This was the yarn that had made me a knitter again after a decade long hiatus. Discouraged because I didn’t have time to knit, I didn’t know how to knit the things I wanted to knit and my knitting didn’t meet my standards, I had given all my knitting needles, yarn and unfinished projects to Goodwill. I remember looking at the back and partly finished front of a silk vest that had sat unfinished for several years and thinking they weren’t as bad as I had thought, but into the Goodwill bag it went. Still, I loved the look of knitted garments, loved the look of yarn in the ball and one day when I happened on a new yarn shop, I wandered in and there, right by the front door, found a basket of sari silk yarn. Soft, colorful with a rich luster. I’d never seen anything like it. I bought three balls and planned to make a shawl.

From the beginning it was a difficult relationship. Even before I left the store, I was frustrated by the colors. There were no color numbers and no dye lots. The yarn comes in all the colors of saris seemingly picked at random and spun into balls. Rich jewel tones, purples, jade and ruby red, and warm autumn colors, browns, oranges and yellow green, predominate. But these are suddenly interupted by the black and orange of Halloween or the red and green of Christmas. I wanted four balls for my shawl, but after pawing unsucessfully through the basket of yarn searching for balls in the same color way, I settled for three similiarly colored balls, enough I thought for a smaller shawl.

When I began to knit I alternated between love for the colors of the yarn, the softness of its feel and exasperation at what seemed to me to be the yarn’s poor quality. It varied in thickness from a single thread to heavy worsted weight, it twisted and kinked as it came off the ball, very difficult for someone who hadn’t held a knitting needle in many years. Unrefined furry puffs of silk marred the smooth appearance of my knitting. And when I finally learned to catch all the varying textures of the yarn in my needles, all of a sudden the colors changed mid ball from rich jewel tones to the warm colors of autumn. I put it away in frustration until I found more of the yarn at another shop and after again searching for a ball in the jewel tones and finished the shawl. After much frustration I finished the shawl only to immediately discover a hole where a thin thread had broken. I mended it with a piece of wool and decided the yarn simply didn’t work.

No matter, I was knitting again. I found internet sites to teach me what I didn’t know about knitting, about tension, gauge, and stitch definition. I collected skeins of wool, organic cotton linen and hemp and made more shawls, scarves, sweaters and hats. I kept the little parts of the balls of recycled silk I had left over in a bowl, beautiful to look at. There was a quality to the yarn I could not resist. Every now and then I’d pick it up, feel it and look at it. I knit a little into a wool scarf and some into a hat. And then I decided to try it alone again. My knitting skills had improved. I felt able to handle its flaws. I started a scarf. And as I knit I understood this was a yarn without guile, its flaws were not flaws, they made the yarn what it was.

Recycled sari silk isn’t really recycled and it isn’t made from old saris. It is made in Nepal from the ends of warp threads remaining on the loom where the new sari was woven. After the sari has been cut from the loom, the threads are gathered, teased and spun by hand on drop spindles. The yarn I buy is fair trade. I am assured my money goes to women’s cooperatives where the women who work in their homes earn enough to support their families.

As I knit with this yarn I wonder about the women who spun it. I know very little about them or the distant part of the world where they work and make their home. The land of Everest, Three Cups of Tea and a Nepalese man I met some years ago who had turned his home in Katmandu into an an orphanage. I imagine these women with a quiet dignity going about their work, kneeling on the floor with the colorful silk laid out before them working their drop spindles. Sometimes my fingers touch a little bit of their lives, pieces of grass, splinters of wood, twisted into the yarn.

There is a quality to this yarn that brings to mind two very elegant elderly sisters who were my neighbors in South Caroline thirty years ago, one a widow, the other never married. They welcomed me into their apartment, furnished with dark wooden furniture with clawed feet, perhaps inherited from their parents, heavy upholestery, drapery, oil paintings and china. And while I would have set such things aside, packed them up to protect them, bringing them out only for special occasions, these were the things with which the elderly sisters were comfortable, the things making their apartment their home. A small crack in a tea cup, wear on the upholstery. These made me comfortable when they invited me in for a cup of tea and freshly baked cookie.

I imagine the women who wear the saris cut from the threads that will be spun into my yarn. These women will have chose their saris for the intracies of the patterns and rich rich colors woven into the silk. When they put on their sari they will study themselves in the mirror and apply a bit of paint to their faces, in a self conscious effort at beauty.

There is no self consciousness to this yarn as their was no self consciousness to my elderly neighbors. Still useful. Unpretentious. And beautiful.

Mother’s Helena: What I Did

2008-12-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

This is Clara's mother's Helena. I made Helena for Clara and knew it would please both Clara, and her mother if I made a matching sweater for mom. See Clara's Helena and Clara's and Mom's together below.

Step-by-step, here's how I made a Mom's Helena...

1. I babysit once a week, so on one of my babysitting days I found one of my daughter in law’s sweaters, measured the bust, arm length, sleeve depth and body length. My dil had a sweater with ¾ sleeves and a bit of swing so I was able to use those measurements. If you only have a traditional sweater to measure, the bust is the important measurement. You can guesstimate the others.

2. Generated a pattern for a top down v-neck cardigan with Sweater Wizard, using the measurements from dil’s own sweater. Size 7 needle; Cascade 220. Any top down v neck cardigan pattern would do.

3. Modified the sleeve increases so that the last four increases were spaced every four rows followed by 1 ½ inches without increases.

4. Modified my basic pattern to make it a Helena as follows:

Worked in stockinette 3 rows after separating for the sleeves.
Using size 5 (2 sizes down) needles worked raised band (k2 rows, p1 row, k2 row)
Back to size 7 needles
Increased to 200 stitches from 168 for bodice swing immediately below raised band
Worked lace pattern for 8 repeats
Switched to size 5 needles and worked 6 rows, then eyelet row, then four rows and bind off

5. Sleeves: I needed to go up a needle size to size 8 because I knit tighter in the round

6. Knitted on the 7 row garter stitch edging pretty much as directed in Helena directions. I used one button right below where I had finished the neck shaping. I put the button hole in the middle row of the edging, the 4th row.

The sweater was easy to knit and looks great. I’m pretty pleased with myself right now!

In Time for Christmas! Whew!

2008-12-23T16:13:00.000-08:00

The Mother Daughter Helena's are done! I hope mother and daughter will model their new sweaters for the camera Christmas morning.

Mom' sweater is in Cascade 220 in a slightly muted pink, Clara's is in Berroco Comfort DK in bright pink. Close enough to satisfy Miss Clara, I think!

Mother Daughter Helenas

2008-12-15T14:15:00.000-08:00

Here is Clara's Helena. I love the picot hem. I'd never seen it before but now I see it everywhere. It is so easy and so pretty! See my December 5th post for pictures before turning the hem under.

And here's Mom's! I have one sleeve, the hem and the edging to do. Hopefully I'll have pictures of that one soon. I started with a Sweater Wizard v-neck cardigan and modified it to be akin to the girl's Helena. I'll post the details when I get it done and know it works! Right now I best get knitting!

February Lady Sweater Hints

2008-12-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

The February Lady Sweater is done and looks terrific on my daughter. I complained about this pattern as I was working on it but I stuck to the pattern, deviated not a wit, and the end result is just what I wanted.

That said, here are some hints for success:

· Everyone says the sweater runs big, or stretches. Pay attention to gauge and choose the finished bust size, not your ready-to-wear size. I made a small for a 41 inch finished bust.

· Mark the front of the sweater after the first row or two so you make sure to get the raglan increases on the right side – every time! With garter stitch it would be easy to get confused.

· Raglan increases: This is the one change I would make to the pattern. The pattern has you make raglan increases every knit row a prescribed number of times and then stop the increases and finish the yoke. But many knitters complain that the pattern results in folds in the underarm. I agree, although they looked better in the end than I feared. So: next time I am going to taper off my increases rather than end them abruptly. I’ll do the last three increases every other knit row rather than every knit row.

I did the M1 front and back increases as suggested. They give a nice look. If you aren’t sure what they are, check out the video at http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/increases. BTW – I love all the videos at knittinghelp.com. I frequently turn to them when I become confused about something I think I should know or used to know and can’t remember.

· Eyelet increases: The pattern calls for a row of eyelet increases in the first knit row after the last raglan increase. I ended up with 12 rows in the yoke below my eyelet increases. I thought that was too much, just for looks. If I were to do it again I’d do the eyelet increases 3 rows up from the last garter stitch row.

Then the question is: to do eyelet increases or not. I thought they looked silly. My daughter thought they were a nice design element. Some knitters try to do an invisible increase but really, right across the yoke, any increase is going to be visible. I thought about doing invisible (knit front and back) increases in the last garter stitch row, right above the beginning of the lace, and think that would work.

· Buttonholes: I ended up with four. Three looks better. I had to do four because I made my second one too soon and there would have been too much yoke below the last buttonhole had I only done three. So don’t make your second buttonhole too soon.

And pay attention to which side you make your buttonhole on. It may not matter to you, but traditionally a woman’s buttonhole goes on the wearer’s right side. If you want it that way, make sure that’s the side you put it on. I used the buttonhole directions referenced in the pattern. It’s ok but I wasn’t thrilled. If anyone knows a better way or has suggestions I’d love to hear them.

· The rest of the sweater went together easily. I knit the sleeves at the end. Others have suggested doing the sleeves earlier so you don’t have so much sweater to maneuver. I wished I had until I finally realized (duh!) I didn’t have to keep turning the sweater everytime I did a round on the sleeve if I turned the sleeve instead. I’ll probably do the sleeve last again just because I always worry I’m running low on yarn and if I ever really am running low it would be easier to make the sleeves shorter than to make the body shorter.

Oops... I forgot to mention one intentional pattern modification I did make. On the sleeves, I decreased one stitch per lace repeat in the last row of the lace. Garter stitch is wider than the lace stitch and I didn't want the cuffs to bell out quite as much as they do on the pattern. If I were to do it again, I think I'd take them in even more. However, once again, my daughter preferred the slight bell aas written in the pattern.

All in all this is a lovely pattern, a quick knit and I’m going to make it again. Soon!

Another Hat!

2008-11-30T17:54:00.000-08:00

My resolution to knit all my leftover yarn into hats to be given to charity at Christmas is not going to be completed this year. I'm afraid this will have to go on the list of resolutions for 2009!

Here's another hat in Plymouth Tweed and I still have enough of that yarn for one more! I love this yarn but I want it gone!

This hat is from the Maniacal Thrower. The pattern for her Slouchy Copy Cat Hat is clearly written, easy to follow and fun to knit. The mock cable rib provides a little diversion for the knitter and interest to the hat! I was pretty pleased with myself when I was done and now I'm wondering how I can use this stitch pattern in one of the sweaters I have planned.

I'm not an economist but...

2008-11-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

We talked about the economy at knitting group this week. We talked about stores closing and retirement funds disappearing. We talked about cutting our own spending. We talked about the empty spaces at the new shopping center in our area, the one built to cater to the affluent, with a day spa, expensive lingerie store and two stores devoted exclusively to olive oil. Already a kitchen store and a stationery shop have closed. I don’t think either had been open a full year.

The shopping center was designed to look like a quaint French village, with a bell tower pealing church music, while the Mercedes dealership next door looked remarkably like a new church when it was under construction.

Today our airwaves and newspapers are filled with stories of low consumer confidence and a consequent drop in consumer spending. Economists debate what should be done while the government seems frantic to convince us to spend again.

I’m not an economist and I’m sure there is a lot about the situation I don’t understand. But what I know and what the women in my knitting group all understand is that we have created this problem ourselves and we aren’t going to fix it by doing more of what got us into the problem in the first place. We have to find economic fixes other than those intended to stimulate more over consumption.

Americans have proved ourselves quite able to spend more than we have but we can’t consume more than we have. Our planet simply won’t allow it. What we have is limited, limited by our natural resources, limited by the size of the planet. I’ve heard that if the whole world consumed at the rate of American consumption, it would take seven planets to fill our demands. I’m not sure the figure is precisely accurate but my common sense, my own looking at the world, tells me it’s not far off.

So why are we trying to get Americans to consume more? Yes, we know businesses close when spending is down. A lot of jobs are lost when Circuit City goes bankrupt. But at best, keeping these stores open, doing business as they have always done, is only a temporary fix, contributing to our trade imbalance and national debt.

As I said, I don’t pretend to be an economist. But I don’t think the economists understand this much either. My eldest daughter majored in economics in college. She tells me that when she entered the business world she quickly learned that most of what she had been taught didn’t hold up.

And, despite whatever holes there may be in my analysis, I’m quite sure my conclusion is true: There has to be a better way. We have to find a way to run our economy not dependent on over consumption and debt. I’m quite sure the future of our country and our planet depends on it.

My intuition tells me knitting is part of the answer. No instant gratification here! Instead the purchase of $50 to $100 of wool, a very renewable resource, yields hours and hours of pleasure in the disciplined creation of a unique hand knit item, perhaps a gift to be enjoyed for many years, rather than something to be tossed out at the end of the season.

And so I continue my current program of sweater knitting. The body of the February Lady is just about done, the lace before blocking is the usual heap of undisciplined yarn. I'll finish the edging and begin work on the sleeves today.

More Sweaters

2008-11-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

Blocking Helena

Clara's Helena is blocked. Now to hem and add the border! The
hem is going to be so pretty! You do a row of (yo k2tog) and that becomes the turning row. When the hem is turned it will make a picot edge. How clever is that!

February Lady Sweater

While Helena was drying I thought I ought to start her mother's sweater. I wanted to adapt the February Lady Sweater to be more like Helena but I'd never made the February Lady and didn't trust my ability to visualize how the pattern would knit up. So I decided before I knit mom's sweater, I'd knit one as written. Here it is in green Cascade 220. I think the yarn is a good choice. The garter stitch has a tendency to stretch and a heavier yarn will help hold it in place.

This is a very simple pattern. So simple I thought I could knit without paying much attention and before I knew it I had had to cast on 5 different times! Yes, 5! The first time my brain was completely turned off and each round the increase moved over a stitch. I had placed a marker before the raglan stitch, right where the increase should go but I moved the marker before increasing. That meant that the next time around the marker came before the previous increase and not right before the raglan stitch. Wrong! Then somehow I put an extra marker in the middle of the back. How did I do that? I don't know, but I had knit several inches before I realized I was knitting a sweater to accomodate quite the dowager's hump. Then I was making the M1 increases backwards, knitting from the back on the right and the front on the left. I've written before of what comes from hurrying. Finally, when I was focused just enough to get it right, I found it to be a very easy knit and I'm just about ready to start the lace.

Mother Daughter Sweaters

2008-10-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

Or why my daughter in law is the best mother for my granddaughter!

I’m probably going to make some people mad with this one…

A young mother in our area was arrested after leaving her baby in the car while getting her hair cut. Sounds awful right? The story reminds us of other stories of babies left in a car with the engine running and doors unlocked, babies left in the car while their mothers were inside drinking or partying oblivious to the child, babies left in a hot car with the windows rolled up. Some of those babies died.

But this mother thought she was taking care of her child. She was following the advice I remember reading from La Leche League when I was a new mother, “Never wake a sleeping baby.” The teething baby had had a rough night, had fallen asleep in his car seat and she didn’t want to wake him. She locked the car and cracked the windows on a day when all agreed overheating was not an issue. She was in a chair twenty feet away and reportedly could keep her eye on the baby. A well meaning stranger saw the baby, called the police and mom was arrested.

The women in my book club agreed with the district attorney’s decision not to charge the mother but thought the mother had been stupid. Someone could have abducted the baby before the mother could get to her car. While she watched, a child abuser could break the lock, open the door, and grab the baby strapped into the car seat secured to the car, all before she could get there. Really? If she were watching from only 20 feet away?

I remember being left in the car as a child. In other ways my parents were very protective, overly protective even. But leaving their children in the car didn’t feel neglectful. I was left in the car while my father went into the bank or the grocery store. Once I awoke in what felt like the middle of the night locked in the back seat of the family car with my two sisters in front of a restaurant on Highway 99. My father had tired while driving and needed a cup of coffee. Did they leave us alone in the car too much? Perhaps. But the danger we felt was abandonment not any being abducted by strangers. Parents didn’t worry so much about child abduction then and locked car doors was thought adequate protection.

When a child was abducted in northern California when I was a child, my parents held us tighter, watched us more closely for awhile. As the horror slipped from the front pages of the newspaper and the front of their consciousness, they relaxed. Today there is no relief for a parent. A child is abducted in Michigan and it is headline news in California. But how many children really are the victims of the scary stranger abduction that is every parent’s worst fear? More than in the past? So many more that a parent can’t leave her child twenty feet away from where she is getting her hair cut?

I needn’t worry about my daughter-in-law leaving Clara in the car. She is the best of mothers and I have none of the criticism I hear from other mothers of sons. And my son is a wonderful father. But he is a worrier and hovers too closely over three year old Clara.

“Relax,” I tell him. “She’s fine.”

And she is. But Clara is a bit of a worrier too. It runs in our family. My own father, yes, the one who left us in the car, was overly protective and fearful for our safety. “Don’t do this.” “Be careful of that.” I’m a bit the same way and my son undoubtedly learned it from me. Thank goodness for my daughter-in-law whose calm, assuring protective encouragement is exactly right for both my son and my granddaughter.

Clara, of course, is very attached to her mother and wants to be just like her. So, for Christmas they will get mother daughter sweaters. Everything has to be pink for Clara these days! Preferably hot pink. But, although she would probably wear it to please Clara, I don’t think Mom wants a little girl’s hot pink sweater. So, the sweaters won’t be exactly alike, but close enough. Clara’s Helena will be knit with Berroco Comfort DK in a warm pink. Mom’s February Lady Sweater will bea slightly muted pink in Cascade 220. I’ll modify the February Lady Sweater to use the same lace pattern that is in Helena.

More Hats and Why I Don't Like Kureyon!

2008-10-15T09:50:00.001-07:00

Three more hats for charity! I finished off the Kureyon and started in on the baby yarn. All the patterns were free downloads found on Ravelry. I'm getting a little bored, so the next ones will probably have cables. The trick is to keep my interest, knit fast enough to get them done by Christmas and still get some other Christmas knitting done. We shall see.

I am not a fan of Noro Kureyon! Fortunately, it’s all gone now, the last of it used in this charity hat. Right now I don't think I'll ever buy more. I finished the decreases at the top of the hat, pulled the yarn through the last six stitches, gently pulled it tight, and it broke! Only a half inch frayed strand remained attached to the hat, not enough left to weave in. I suppose I should have unknit the last few rows, attached a new piece of yarn, and reknit. Instead, I put a dab of Fray Check on the bit of yarn left and pulled it to the inside with a crochet hook. It should hold.

My biggest complaint about Kureyon is that the yarn is poorly spun. It varies significantly in thickness from thin and tightly spun to downright pouffy. Now I know it is also very weak. It kinks more than any yarn I have ever knit with. I was constantly trying to straighten out the kinks in the yarn coming off the skein as I knit.

There is a lot of vegetable matter in the yarn but I can live with that, a small trade off for the beautiful colors.

Yes, Kureyon colors are beautiful. That’s why I bought it! But the colors lost their appeal for me when I knit the yarn into this simple sweater in the round, a very poor choice for this yarn. A more experienced knitter would have known better. The striping in the body is narrow and busy. And because the sleeves are narrower than the body, a color goes around more times and the stripes in the sleeves are wider than the narrow stripes in the body. Not an attractive look.

The narrow modular scarf and hats knit with leftovers were much better suited to the yarn. Entrelac would also be nice.

Charity Hats From Stash

2008-09-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hat #1 blocking on a balloon

This was Plymouth tweed leftover from a sweater I knit for my sister. I knit the hat too big and had to felt it down to a reasonable size.

Hat #2

Noro Kureyon left from a sweater. This is much better in a hat than in a sweater. I knit the sweater in the round and the striping was narrow and busy.

Hat #3

Yarn left over from a sweater for my granddaughter.

Where did I get all this yarn?

2008-09-19T13:03:00.002-07:00

There are various motivations for knitting. Most of the time I knit something because I covet whatever it is I decide to knit. I see myself wearing that elegant sweater or beautiful shawl and I buy the yarn fully intending to wear it. More often than not, I end up giving away what I make. But, even so, it is covetousness pure and simple that initiates the project. Other projects begin with a more generous attitude. A pregnant young woman takes the seat next to me in a class for hospice volunteers and I resolve to make something for her baby. I see the Statue of Liberty done in intarsia on the front of a sweater and resolve to knit one for my son, an immigration attorney (I don’t think he reads this.) But my most recent knitting project is a product of embarrassment I felt when I realized the amount of yarn I have accumulated.

When my mother moved out of her house, I took her blanket chest, a very plain old pine box-like trunk. Its straight rectangular lines, hand cut dove tailing, simple lock, and the name and address written on the bottom suggests it carried its owner’s belongings to California many years ago. My parents found it in 1945 in San Jose. It lay discarded in the storage shed behind their first house. My father cleaned it and for more than sixty years it held my mother’s blankets. Now it would hold my yarn.

I placed the familiar old piece in my office, feeling smug that my yarn would be neat and orderly, all in one place, and began pulling yarn stashed in fabric baskets on my bookshelves, in a carpet bag brought back from a trip to Turkey, in plastic bins in my closet, and in bags on the floor. I had yarn set aside for three sweaters. I had lace weight yarn for at least five shawls. I had baby yarn. I had the yarn for the Masters swatches. Not to mention that Peaches & Crème I just bought! Nor all the skeins left over from completed projects because I’m deathly afraid of not having enough to finish. I didn’t even get to the yarn in my sewing room! There was more yarn than the chest would hold.

It’s time to get this under control. My hands can’t knit as fast as I can dream up projects and buy yarn! It’s time to knit down my stash. I’ve made two resolutions: (1) I’m going to knit those bits and pieces of left over skeins into hats to give to charity at Christmas. By Christmas they all have to be gone! And, (2) I’m going to knit one project from stash for every project for which I buy new yarn.

Now…what about all that fabric in my sewing room?

The Company of Women

2008-09-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon was the second meeting of our new knitting group – 15 women getting together once a month just to knit. More than half of the group are beginners. They were told to bring size 8 needles and worsted weight yarn. One member, a retired yarn shop owner, taught them the basics, casting on, knitting and purling. The rest of us brought works in progress.

The group came together through our church. We are Catholic and so don’t talk much about religion. For us, it’s more a private matter. Instead, as the beginners fussed over dropped stitches and the difference between knitting and purling, and the experienced knitters offered encouragement, we talked about the things all women talk about: husbands, whether at home, dead or divorced; children and grandchildren; the work we did and do, the goings on in our community; the things that make us happy and the things that annoy. We nibbled cookies and we knit.

Women need the company of women. In another time, when families were larger and less mobile, women grew up surrounded by older women who taught them to knit and sew and talked about life. Younger women learned about marriage and childbirth from women who married and had children before they did. They watched the older women lose children and husbands and learn to laugh again and they knew that they too could learn to laugh again. They watched their grandmothers, mothers and aunts age and die and understood that they, too, would age and die one day. Now our communities are too often segregated by age and we are denied access to the wisdom of those who go ahead of us. Childbirth is feared rather than celebrated. A mother is never good enough. And aging must be denied.

Our knitting group brought women together again and became the means for sharing the wisdom of our experiences again. The oldest knitter told us the yarn she was knitting into a poncho was yarn she had first knit into a sweater while sitting with her husband before his death. She didn't like the sweater and was knitting the yarn into something new. She told us about the yarn and we learned about the days she spent at her husband's bedside. We learned another woman had had cancer as she showed us the chemo hats she was knitting. The youngest knitter, a mother with school age children, told us about her daughters as she knit a backpack for her daughter to give as a birthday gift.

And so it went for two hours of knitting and chatting. After two hours we packed up our knitting, put away the tables and chairs, and lingered just a bit. Someone said we should have our meetings more often. And everyone agreed.

I said I’d never make a dishcloth!

2008-09-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

Why would anyone want to knit a dish cloth? Knitting requires time. Each stitch is worked individually. You don’t sit down at the sewing machine and knock off a dish cloth in a few minutes. I don’t know how fast others knit, but the simplest little dish cloth is going to take me a few hours. Then after it is done, what? It gets used! Thrown in soapy water, sloshed around, mangled and soon, stained. It seems like a waste of effort. Knitting should be something to be oohed and ahhed over, something to be worn and attract compliments, a shawl or a sweater perhaps. Who is going to admire a dishcloth?

Nor do I remember the women in my family knitting dishcloths. Perhaps other grandmothers did. The cotton dishcloths sold when I was a girl in the 1950s were loosely woven. Were they based on dishcloths some women had made? I don’t know. I remember my grandmother and older aunts using rags, never a hand knit dishcloth. If knitting dishcloths was something passed down through the generations, it skipped my family.

But I had a little hemp yarn left from the Cool Hemp Ponchette, not enough for a bag. I know from my own experience that hemp is very strong and gets softer the more it is washed. And I’ve read that it has antibacterial properties. I needed a mindless project, something to work on while watching the evening news or visiting with family.

I need to improve some of my knitting for the Masters program. I have to learn to make a seed stitch without holes, cables and decreases without stretched stitches. Hemp isn't the best fiber for working on tension, it has a will of its own. But it is good practice. So I knit a dishcloth.

To make it more interesting, I knit it on the diagonal:

Cast on 3
Knit 2 rows,
K2, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, k2,
Repeat until half of yarn is used, then start decreasing,
K1, K2tog, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, K2,
Repeat until 3 stitches remain, knit 3, turn and bind off.
And because I still had yarn, I added a border in single crochet.

Easy enough!

I don’t do anything half way. I jump in with both feet. So, when I decided to knit one dish cloth, I also decided to order some Peaches & Creme to knit more. There were so many colors to choose from and I figured shipping was less per ball the more balls I ordered, so I now have 24 balls of Peaches & Creme.

This fall I’ll be working on the quality of my stitches while making dish cloths to wrap Christmas cookies and breads to give as little gifts. Unfortunately I didn’t buy any Christmas colors. I have to order those now.

Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 3 - Gauge!

2008-08-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Lesson 3 requires knitting 5 swatches, all in the same yarn and with the same needles, in 5 different stitch patterns, garter, stockinette, seed, cable and lace, and then comparing the gauge. This was a l iberating assignment! My head is full of ideas for sweaters combining different stitch patterns. But I’ve been reluctant to tackle them because I wasn’t sure how the gauges in the various patterns would work together. I knew a cable required more stitches than stockinette and that seed was different from both and I wasn't quite up to sitting down and figuring out how to combine them. The answer, of course, is simple! Make a swatch, measure, then add or decrease stitches accordingly. After this lesson, I have the courage to do it.

The last and optional swatch required choosing a cable, knit a swatch and write the pattern for the swatch pattern. I was surprised how difficult that was! There are so many details to include. A careful pattern writer earns every penny of the cost of a pattern. Deciding what to knit is the easy part. Writing it down for someone else to follow – that is difficult! Hopefully it will get easier with practice!

Basics, basics, basics gave me a excellent foundation for growing as a knitter. There are areas where I need to improve. My seed stitch still has holes. My cable still has the occasional stretched stitch. But I have a much better sense of what I need to do to improve.

More importantly, I’ve found a new confidence and willingness to try more difficult designs. And I'm ready to tackle TKGA's Masters Program.

Basics Basics Basics - On to Lesson 2

2008-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Decreases!

Like most knitters I had done many knit-two-togethers and slip- slip-knits. But I had never really studied them. I’d never asked myself what makes ssk the closest mirror image of k2tog. Nor had I really thought much about what made a decrease full fashioned. I just followed the pattern, using the decrease the pattern directed for the left and for the right . I never really thought about why. I had used several of the alternate decreases when that was what a pattern called for but I hadn’t examined whether I thought they worked as well opposite k2tog. This was Lesson 2.

Again, I fussed about tension. In her comments, Arenda suggested I worry less! But she did point out that my left slanting decreases stretched. She suggested knitting decreases on the tips of my needles. Her commend made me realized how much I had been manhandling my yarn, oblivious to how I was stretching the stitches, and this affected their appearance. This insight was a big step to significant improvement in my knitting!

Finally, perhaps because I have been knitting lace recently, my lace swatch was the best of my swatches!

Basics Basics Basics - Lesson 1

2008-08-20T11:07:00.001-07:00

Lesson 1 of the Basics Basics Basics Course got me started with casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing and four different increases. Like most who take the course, these were not new techniques. But the class required that I look carefully at what I did, how it looked and consider which of several techniques look better in which circumstances. For instance, I’d always know the long tail cast on creates the first knit row but I’d always relied on the pattern to tell me whether the next row should be right side or wrong side. After taking this class I’ll make that decision myself.

My first difficulty was figuring out how to work each of the increases. I knew how to make them but I didn’t know which was which. The names aren’t standardized. So I did what I tell anyone getting started or back into knitting to do: check out the instructional videos at KnittingHelp.com. Once I figured out that the bar increase is called KFB (knit in front and back) and the Make 1 increase is called either KRL (knit right loop) or KFL (knit front loop) on KnittingHelp.com, I had no problem making the increases.

I did have problems making them well and really struggled with the Make 1. The instructor sympathetically assured me many knitters find it difficult. The increase is made from the row below and when that bar is pulled up it affects the tension of the row below. The suggested inserting a yarn over in the row below the increase where increase will be made and use the yarn over yarn for the increase.

TKGA teaches weaving in the ends with duplicate stitch. Try it! This alone made the course worthwhile. Woven in this way the end disappears never to be seen again.

I wanted these stitches to be perfect but they weren’t! Despite pulling the yarn tight on the beginning of a new row, my selvedges weren’t as neat as I would like them although careful blocking did help considerably.

Finally, I decided the swatches were as good as I could make them. I sent them off and within the week had them back from Arenda. She complimented my garter stitch, the placement of my increases and the way some of the increases were made. She pointed out with threads drawn through the swatch where my tension wasn’t even and gave me pointers for how to make it better. And she pointed out I had misread the directions for the swatch 5. Don't look at that one as an example for what it should look like!

I resubmitted my M1 increase swatch with lesson 2 but it still needed improvement. This is a learning class, I didn’t have to prove I’d mastered it. I’ll practice this one on sweater sleeves soon. I will have to get it better for the Masters.

Basics Basics Basics

2008-08-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

While on vacation in Banff I admired beautiful qiviuk yarn at $138 for 2 ounces, about 200 yards. The small knitted items were soft and light with a beautiful halo. The yarns may well have been the most beautiful yarns ever and, even at that price, I was tempted to buy enough for a small scarf.

But I knew my knitting wouldn’t measure up to that yarn. It’s not that I am a perfectionist! But I want to be a better knitter. I want my knitting to be worthy of beautiful yarn. I want the things I knit to have the look of “hand made” not “home made.”

And so I came home and signed up for Basics Basics Basics, a correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild of America, TKGA. The course was recently revised by Arenda Holladay, who now acts as the instructor. The three lessons covering pretty much everything necessary for basic knitting: casting on, binding off, garter, stockinette, ribbing, lace and cable stitches, four increases, four decreases, gauge and basic pattern writing. The pattern writing is an optional assignment for students who want to continue on to TKGA’s Masters classes. The student knits swatches for each lesson and sends them to Arenda for a very thorough evaluation. Arenda is amazingly quick to send the swatches back with both compliments and suggestions for improvement. If a student is having difficulty with a particular technique Arenda invites, but does not require, her to try again and send another swatch in for review. I had difficulty with the M1 increase and repeated that swatch for review.

The Basics course does not require the student to master each of the skills. I wanted my first swatches to be perfect. They weren’t! Despite knitting and reknitting, they just weren’t perfect and when Arenda sent them back to me, she had pointed out where I needed to make improvement. Interestingly, the spots pointed out by Arenda were not the ones I had stressed over. Lesson learned! The next two lessons I made a good faith effort to knit my best but sent them off knowing they Arenda would return them with suggestions for how I could make the stitches better.

Probably the most important thing the class taught me was to look at my knitting not just critically, but with an eye for why something I didn’t like was happening. Why is a stitch stretched out? Why is there a hole where there shouldn’t be a hole? I didn’t learn to fix everything immediately but I learned to think about it and had suggestions to practice that would fix it. In the end I knew I’d learned a lot when right after sending off my last swatches I cast on the ribbing for a sweater. Thanks to what I had learned in Basics Basics Basics, my ribbing looked so much neater than any ribbing I had ever knit before. Thank you, Arenda!

In my next postings, I’ll photograph the swatches from the three lessons and share some of what I have learned. But right now I’m off to sign up for Level 1 of TKGA’s Masters Knitting Program!

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Right!

2008-08-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

A strong streak of perfectionism runs through the women in my family.

If you were to visit me and see my housekeeping you might be dubious when I tell you I am a perfectionist. It’s just that I don’t direct my perfectionism to being a perfect housekeeper. My grandmother was! It wasn’t hyperbole to say you could eat off her floor. You really could! But, of course, she would have been aghast at any food falling on her floor. My mother complained that Gram’s housekeeping came before everything else when she was a child, that when the family headed out the door for fun they often had to wait while Gram finished cleaning.

My mother rebelled before me. She went to college and to work. Although she told us she didn’t want to be like her mother, we cleaned the house every Saturday morning. She never had any reason to fear a drop-in visit from the minister, or anyone else for that matter. The unexpected guest was always greeted with a clean house. One afternoon Mrs. M__, who lived across the street, gossiped to my mother that another neighbor washed her kitchen floor but never washed her baseboards. My mother laughed thinking she didn’t wash hers either.

“Oh, but you work!” Mrs. M__ was quick to recover.

I saw my mother washing the baseboards after that.

Before my mother went back to work she stayed home, hung starched and ironed ruffled unbleached muslin curtains in the living room, refinished antique furniture and embroidered. She did a sampler in cross stitch when I was very young which hung over the small kitchen table where my family ate most of our meals all the years of my child hood and all the years of my children’s childhood.

Now she is moving out of the house where the sampler hung and whose baseboards she washed into a one bedroom apartment. She wants her daughters and grandchildren to take her things, hoping we will value the things she valued.

I read the embroidered words,

“Hearts are happy, health is good, where loving hands prepare the food"

I told her I had always liked it, that it was a warm memory from my childhood.

“Here, take it now,” she handed it to me.

I held the wooded frame in my hands and looked at the stitching. It was not well stitched. I felt a moment of embarrassment for my mother. She had not known to carefully separate each of the plies of the embroidery floss before stitching with two or three to prevent the threads from twisting. Nor had she known to make sure all her stitches crossed in the same direction. The sampler had hung next to a beautifully stitched sampler a friend gave to her on her retirement. Had she known her own work was of an inferior quality? Did it bother her?

After she went back to work she decorated with the knick knacks, paintings and other souvenirs she collected on her travels rather than with things she had made. Those aren’t the things I want from her house. I want the sampler. That it was not well made did not make me value it less. It spoke to me of home, of a good time that is now gone. I took it for my son and daughter-in-law and now it hangs in their kitchen.

I wonder if my mother gave up hand work because she didn’t have the time or interest to do it better. I wonder if she felt that if it she couldn’t do it right, she shouldn’t do it at all.

Thoughts on Ene’s Scarf: It's too much work!

2008-08-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

During my week in the mountains I finally finished my Ene's Scarf. And, if I do say so myself, it is a beautiful shawl and will make a lovely gift - unless I keep it for myself.

The Nancy Bush pattern printed in Scarf Style from Interweave Press begins with casting on 375 stitches with the yarn held double. I didn’t realize that until I started to knit. It is a bottom up pattern and I’ve always done top down. I was ready to quit before I started! 375 stitches!

I started out with blue lace weight yarn but the 375 little stitches in blue lace weight yarn are very difficult to see on KnitPicks Harmony wood needles. The 750 strands of yarn, scrunched together on the needle were impossible to see against the variegated colors of the wood needles – especially when knitting in the evening with my older eyes. I started over with heavier yarn, Elsebeth Lavold’s silky wool.

My suggestions for a beautiful Ene:

Cast on with a larger needle. I knit the shawl with a size 6 needle but cast on with size 7. Cast on rows tend to be a little tight and I needed a little give. Using a larger needle for the cast on also allowed me to block the edging to a sharp point rather than to a soft curve. The edging, with the candle flame like points, is what sets the Ene apart as a beautiful scarf.

When casting on, I placed markers every 25 stitches and counted each time I placed one. I also placed a hook-on marker in stitch 188, the half way point.

The first row sets up the pattern and the only way to make sure to get it right is to count and count again. There is nothing to look at to tell you if you have miscounted or not. I put a marker in every double decrease and counted to make sure there were 14 stitches in each pattern repeat. And counted again. I used a 41 inch circular needle. After the first row was knitted I laid it out flat, noted where I thought the center was and matched up markers on each side to make sure it really was symmetrical and I hadn’t ended up with 12 repeats on one side and 10 on the other. That would have been very easy to do. Fortunately, with the marker in the center stitch, I got it right the first time.

Chart 1: The outer border of the shawl, is not difficult, indeed after the first two rows, the pattern is visible and mistakes would be easy to catch if they were not hidden in the sheer mass of 375 stitches. Just keep an eye on the yarn overs and all will be well.

Chart 2 is very easy, four rows of garter stitch, followed by a row of yarn overs and knit 2 togethers, followed by four more rows of garter stitch. But watch out for the additional decreases in three of its ten rows.

Chart 3: Enjoy! The rows are getting shorter fast and the knitting is easier. Just enough concentration is required. Although chart 3 is 23 rows, it is really just two different stitch patterns, each with two alternating sets of three for a 6 stitch repeat. I counted out the pattern to myself as I knit and checked myself by saying it backwards on the purl row. I sometimes dropped a yarn over or became distracted and knit one of the three-stitch halves of the repeat twice. But any mistake was easy to see. The double decrease sits neatly in the middle of a set of three stitches, either between 2 knit 1s or between 2 yarn overs.

Bind off: This is wonderful! I had never done a three needle bind off before and was thrilled. It came together easily and perfectly!

If I were to do it again…

I’d pull out Evelyn Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles, pick a nice lace pattern for the body of the shawl, start at the top and when I had the right number of stitches add the two borders from Charts 1 and 2. No more casting on 375 stitches for me!

Finally, why is it called a scarf?

According to Merriam-Webster on-line the difference between a shawl and a scarf is subtle:

Scarf: A length or square of fabric worn around the neck or head. Probably based on Old Northern French escarpe, probably identical with Old French excharpe ‘pilgrim’s scrip’.
Shawl: A piece of fabric warn by women over the shoulders or head or wrapped around a baby. From Urdu or Persian, probably from Shaliat, a town in India.

The Ene is a shawl.

Family Needlework and Arthritis

2008-08-03T17:08:00.000-07:00

The arthritis suggesting I give up hand appliqué is still just a quiet voice reminding me gently now and then of my place among the women in my family. My mother was about the age I am now when arthritis caused her to give up sewing doll clothes for her grandchildren.

My grandmother made beautiful crocheted doilies, tableclothes and bedspreads. Her standards were always exacting and the pieces I have are seemingly without mistakes. One lies on my dining room table. The layette set she made for me, her first grandchild, is done in tiny stitches, no bigger than the width of the white and blue thread she used. Later, when she went to live with my mother because she could no longer live alone, her knuckles were gnarled but she sat quietly on the sofa for hours, embroidering pillow cases. My mother bought her embroidery floss and stamped cases from the variety store. She couldn’t see to divide the threads and so used all six strands of the embroidery floss to make long, uneven stitches. I don't know how she threaded her needle. Fortunately, dementia allowed her to enjoy embroidery despite the quality of her work.

My mother’s Aunt Hett was a much younger woman when arthritis interfered. In the early part of the 20th century, she sought help from the doctors at the University of California medical school in San Francisco. On the first visit, the doctor looked at her hands and ordered amputation of one of her fingers. When her arthritis didn’t improve, she went back. This time Hett looked carefully at what the doctor had written on the order before going upstairs for a second amputation. The doctor had written “for research.” Hett turned around, climbed back down the stairs, walked out the front doors and didn’t go back.

Clara's Organic Cotton Blanket

2008-07-29T13:08:00.001-07:00

Where's Clara? Clara will be three in August and sometimes still plays peek a boo. Here she is hiding under the blanket I knit for her before she was born. I used Pakucho Certified Organic Cotton. The blanket is one of her favorites. It's been slept with, played with, picnicked on. Clara's mother throws it in the washer and dryer and the blanket is only softer and prettier than it was when it was new.

You don't need a pattern. Those of you who knit dishcloths will recognize this:

Row 1: Cast on 3 stitches

Row 2: Knit
Row 3: Knit 2, yarn over, knit to end
Row 4: Knit 2, yarn over, knit to end
Continue repeating row 3 until you have a triangle big enough for half of your blanket (or think you are close to having used half your yarn) then start decreasing:
Row X: Knit 1, knit 2 together, yarn over, knit 2 together, knit to end.
Continue repeating Row X until you have three stitches on the needle. Cast off.

The yarn overs created an eyelet edge. I threaded a ribbon through the eyelet holes and tied it in a corner. And I added a simple crochetted picot border. Something like: double crochet all around, with three stitches in each corner stitch. Next row: single crochet in first stitch, single crochet, chain 3, single crochet in next stitch, single crochet. repeat around.

Here is a similiar pattern. The border is more complicated than what I did but it doesn't look too difficult.

Linen Ponchette - This one is for me!

2008-07-27T16:09:00.001-07:00

“What are you going to do with all those shawls?” my friend, Nancy asks me. She would like to see me knit pieces to include in my quilts and wall hangings. Nancy's quilts were always works of art. Now after years of perfecting her piecing and quilting skills, she is flourishing as a fiber artist making art quilts.

Yes, I’ve knitted a lot of shawls, scarves and ponchettes. And I’m knitting more. But I really don’t have too many because after I knit them, I give them away. When a daughter, sister, or friend admires something I’ve made, I might give it to her right then. Or I might wait until her birthday. I am happy when my work is admired, when I know it will be worn. It is what an artist feels when her work is hung in a gallery. As a knitter, having my work worn, is having it displayed. Isn't that what every artist wants?

And giving one away gives me reason to knit another. So, when my daughter admired the Cool Hemp Ponchette knit in Allhemp6, it was hers. I had another planned.

This time I knit the pattern in Euroflax sport weight linen. It was the color, willow, that first drew me to the yarn. This was my first experience knitting with linen and I found it behaved very much like the hemp although the linen wasn’t quite as rough and itchy on my hand. Once again this was a quick, easy to knit pattern. After knitting the basic rectangle that forms the ponchette, I tossed it in the washing machine with a load of whites (no bleach!), then into the dryer. I took it out while still damp, blocked it to the size recommended in the pattern as I would any lace project, stretching out the points as much as I could. When it was dry I seamed it. The linen and the hemp both biased quite a bit but the pattern seemed designed for that and the ponchette hangs with a bit of swing and a casual elegance to dress up a warm day.

I’m going to wear it.

A Week In the Pines with Friends and Fiber

2008-07-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

Sunday after dinner we covered the dining room table with felt and plastic table cloths. Nancy and Kay set up their machines at each end of the table and I laid out my appliqué supplies in the middle. We set up an ironing board in the kitchen.

Monday morning we got right to work. Nancy is the most disciplined of the three of us. She finished three traditional two colored quilts from blocks she had pieced at home and had ready to sew together.

Kay sewed the blocks of what will be a beautiful batik quilt and I started work on my appliqué. Kay and I took frequent knitting breaks.

My appliqué was not a success. Although I thought I had started it 10 years ago, Nancy corrected me. I started it 5 years ago when she and I went to Asilomar together. In any event, my skills have declined and my fingers have stiffened since the last time I picked it up. The first day went well. I stitched the long smooth lines of the trunk and branches of the tree of life and remembered how much I enjoyed appliqué and had ideas for lots of applique in my future. But the second day I worked on one of the flowers and couldn’t get the petals or the leaves to point, the v’s between the half circles in my scallops turned into curved u’s. I wasn’t at all happy with my work. The third day I ripped out what I had done.

I have two choices: give it up and never finish or find another way. I’ve decided to try the machine. I’ll free motion stitch around the edges of each floral piece. This will give them a slight frayed edge when the quilt is washed. After the pieces are all down I’ll free motion quilt with colored thread, silk or sulky, repeating the shapes of the appliquéd motifs. It should work. And, this way there is a good chance it will be finished someday and it won’t ever be finished if I stick to what I started.

After I put the appliqué away, I spent the last days knitting. More on that later.

Getting To Not Getting Away

2008-07-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

I’m off to join two friends for a week of sewing in the mountains.

In the past the three of us attended Empty Spools seminars at Asilomar together. The location, right on the Pacific Ocean, the activity, working with fabric, the company, other quilters, was wonderful. The Asilomar Conference Grounds, part of the California State Park system, with buildings designed by Julia Morgan, sits directly across from the beach in Pacific Grove. The rooms range from cozy and rustic with a fireplace to dorm like. The food was plentiful and good. And five days with no work other than that I chose to do with fabric was wonderful.

But when the Empty Spools schedule came out this year we couldn’t find a session that worked for all of us. We’ve decided to try a private retreat instead. We are going to my sister’s mountain home, snuggled in the Sierras between Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, surrounded by pines, away from traffic and internet service. Only the squawking blue jays will interrupt the silence. We’ll take our fabric, machines and notions and get to work.

We’ll eat well too! We are all good cooks who enjoy cooking. Nancy is making her special triple ginger cookies, Kay promised oatmeal cookies. I just finished baking a dozen vanilla cupcakes, put together premeasured packages of ingredients for baking a cherry upside down cake and chocolate chip cookies. Three nights we are having main dish salads. Tri tip and curried tuna are two on the menu. One night we will have chicken curry. We’ll be driving south through farm country and intend to stop for fresh fruit and vegetables on the way. We’ve also packed nine bags of microwave popcorn.

I used to look forward to going to Asilomar to get away. To get away from the long hours and responsibilities of a demanding job and all that went with it, a commute that had me in stop and go traffic for an hour in the morning and again in the evening, an inflexible schedule. I looked forward to getting away from those things that stifled the inner artist I wanted to nurture.

I don’t look forward to getting away anymore. I don’t look forward to getting way from what I do everyday because today I do those things I choose to do, knitting lace shawls, baking cupcakes for 2 year old Clara, meeting a friend for lunch and volunteering that fits me so much better than the work I used to do. I don’t look forward to getting away from the husband who supports and encourages me. And I don’t look forward to getting away from the pleasant community where I live.

Instead, I look forward to getting to. Getting to the mountains, the pine trees, the quiet. I look forward to getting to the hand appliqué wall hanging I started in an Empty Spools class taught by Pat Campbell 10 years ago. I worked on it for 5 restful days with Pat's help, sitting with other women, talking quietly as we worked. I was pleased with my piece, the colors and fabrics I had chosen. I was happy with my stitching. But I brought it home, set it aside and in the distractions and busyness of life, never picked it up again. It still sits with my hand traced pattern basted to the front, many pieces are only pinned in place. Others haven't even been started. I’m looking forward to getting to it.

I’m not looking forward to getting away, I’m looking forward to time spent with friends, with nature and fiber. I’m taking my knitting too!

4th of July Heartland Shawl

2008-07-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

Mine was a quiet 4th of July. I cleaned the house, prepared food for family arriving the next day, and cast on Evelyn Clark’s Heartland Lace Shawl.

The Ravelry Knit Along for Evelyn Clark’s Heartland Lace Shawl started in mid June but I had too many projects on my plate and, after selecting sport weight Misti Alpaca in a brick heather, knitting a gauge swatch and selecting a size 6 needle, I set the project aside. When one of the other knitters said her goal was to cast on July 4th, that worked for me.

Honoring the buffalo who once roamed strong and free seemed a fitting celebration of all that is good about my country. The bulk of the shawl is done in Clark’s Bison Tracks Lace depicting "the buffalo’s heart-shaped hoof prints alternating with small diamonds that point to the four directions on earth.” The shawl’s edging is called the River of Life. The shawl is a celebration of the buffalo’s return, she says.

I hope the buffalo are returning. Five were born this spring on a small ranch near my house. The herd of 12 graze on a hill cheering commuters on their way home from work in Sacramento. Twenty-five years ago there were only two.

My husband hung out our flag as he does every Independence Day. I hunted for the marches of John Philip Sousa on the radio to cheer my work. Instead I found myself singing “We Shall Overcome” with Bruce Springsteen.

Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall live in peace someday.

The Cool Hemp Ponchette and Learning to Take Better Pictures

2008-07-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

After I posted the picture of my Cool Hemp Ponchette, I found this comment,

“I really like this one, Mom!”

So, of course, it was hers. But before she was allowed to take it home, I needed a picture of her modeling the ponchette. So here it is. This picture is better than the one I posted earlier and not just because the model is 33 years younger than her mother!

Nor can the difference be attributed to the skill of the photographer. Both were taken by my husband, a professional videographer who knows how to take good pictures.

The white tee shirt I wore in the earlier picture was not a good idea. Despite having been repeatedly told not to wear white in photographs, I thought I needed contrast to show the stitch definition and I didn't think the white would be too harsh under the ponchette. I was wrong. The stitch definition is clear in the pictures of my daughter while the color of the tee shirt she happened to have on is neither jarring nor unattractive.

I've decided to spend some time learning to take better pictures of my work and hopefully you'll see improvements in those I post. I’ll share the lessons as I learn them.

Cotton - Not Organic

2008-07-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Our northern California skies have been grey and heavy from the thousands of wildfires burning since the third week in June. There wasn't any breeze for days and the air itself felt dead. My friend’s husband called it “nuclear winter”. Another said it felt like the end of the world.

On television we watch horrific news about flooding in the Midwest while we pay more and more for a tank of gas. Every night the evening news shows us people turning to smaller cars and even bicycles, cutting back on travel and luxuries, while car dealerships and automobile manufacturers are in financial trouble.

Are we finally going to realize that the earth’s resources are finite and that we cannot continue to consume a hugely disproportionate share without hurting ourselves as well as others? Or will we look for a temporary fix and then go blithely on, ignoring the disastrous consequences for the world’s poor as well as for our own children?

I certainly wasn’t focused on the consequences of my buying decisions when I bought the cotton yesterday. Pleased with my hemp ponchette, I wanted to try other vegetable fibers. I already had some Euroflax sport weight linen but when I stopped by my LYS to show my new ponchette I came out with some Classic Elite Provence, a mercerized cotton in a lovely blue.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know cotton production requires large amounts of petroleum based products for herbicides and defoliants. I certainly knew environmental standards are not always either sufficient or enforced and these toxic chemicals are allowed to run over workers and into the water supply. I didn’t know much about mercerization but I looked it up after I got home and learned it requires large amounts of sodium hydroxide, another very toxic chemical. And what about those dyes?

Three years ago I knit a baby blanket for granddaughter. It was a simple garter stitch square in Pakucho organic cotton, knit on the diagonal with an eyelet border. The naturally pigmented cotton is grown and harvested in Peru using pre-Columbian, 100% organic, farming techniques. Three years later, the blanket I made has provided many hours of both comfort and play for Clara. She takes it to bed for nap time and night time and during play puts her stuffed animals to sleep under it. Her mother washes it in the washer and dries it in the drier. The blanket is softer, cuddlier and just as pretty now as when it was new.

No, I wasn’t thinking when I bought that cotton.

Cool Hemp Ponchette

2008-07-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

I’m wearing my new Cool Hemp Ponchette made without deviation from the Lanaknits pattern. And I like it! The design in the lace shows up clearly, the opening folds into a slight cowl and the hemp has a lovely drape. It is a fun little cover up to add just a touch of style to my tee shirts. Later I’ll be meeting a friend for lunch and the ponchette will dress me up just a bit. And it's always nice to have a wrap in a restaurant with the air conditioner running on high.

I’m very impressed with the way the ponchette drapes. You can see this on many of the project pictures other knitters have posted on Ravelry. After knitting, I washed it in the washer and dried it in the dryer until almost dry. Then I laid it out on the blocking mats and blocked it to size, stretching out each of the points in the lace border.

This was the first time I’d knit with hemp and I’m curious to see how it wears. I know it will be both soft and strong. I know it will be soft because after I redid the seam three times to get it to meet my standards, that little bit of yarn was soft as silk. And I know it’s strong because as soon as I put it on this morning I caught a bit of the lace on the sharp edge of a house fan and pulled out a big loop of yarn. I gave it a good tug and all the strands were nicely back in place.

Knitting with hemp was like knitting with kitchen twine. It seemed to make my fingers itch and its resistance to being manipulated exacerbated my early arthritis. After I was done I read on the Lanaknits website a suggestion to soak the hemp in hot water and hair conditioner before knitting. I’ll try that next time. The end product is so nice I don’t want the stiffness of the yarn to keep me from using it.

Ene’s Scarf: I’m half way!

2008-06-29T12:32:00.001-07:00

I stuck out the Ene, didn’t frog it after all. I figured out where I made mistakes, decided they didn’t show and carried on.

I’m halfway done! Thank you to Madorville for showing us how to figure out what percentage of a triangle we have already knitted. Her excel spread sheet is very useful if you are wondering whether you have enough yarn. She uses the Ene as an example and reports that Row 55, the last knit row of the first time through Chart 3, is the half way point. The rows are gradually getting shorter, the pattern is easier. I can see the triangle taking shape from the double decreases running down the middle.

Now this is pleasurable knitting. There is an easy rhythm to the stitches, alternating three stitch repeats. It requires just enough attention to be interesting without being frustrating. I can relax and feel the steady flow of yarn through my fingers. This is the knitting I have in mind when I say I like to knit. In my mind’s eye I see myself one with a long line of women knitting through the centuries, sitting quietly in a sunny window, our needles moving smoothly as something beautiful takes form from the yarn in our hands. This is the way knitting should be.

I might be tempted to check Madorville's formula at the end of each knitting session, to be ever mindful of my progress, of how much longer I must knit before I will be done. But I won't! This time I refuse to rush in anticipation of reaching the end, anxious to begin the next project. I’m going to let go of my timetables and let the knitting set its own pace. I’ve worked hard to get to this point in my Ene journey. I’m going to savor it.

1970 Knitting In The Office

2008-06-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

I didn’t think I had much in common with the other women. They sat all day at their metal desks, six lined up in the center of the room, three facing the walls, working at their adding machines and typewriters. I was in graduate school and after morning classes, worked afternoons in the university’s accounting department processing invoices. Each day I arrived during the lunch hour to find a big stack of invoices on my desk. My job was to take out the staples, put the invoice together with supporting papers in order with the invoice on top, staple the stack back together, add up the amount payable, stamp the invoice with a big rubber stamped form and fill in the blanks with the payee, invoice date, invoice number and amount to be paid. With slight variation, it was what we all did. Invoices were received in the mailroom; date stamped and assigned a number. Each of us was given part of the numerical sequence.

Promptly at 3:00 the yarn came out and for 15 minutes the women knit. I watched baby blankets, sweaters and one bikini take form. They knit every day during their morning and afternoon breaks. They knit at lunch too. They were cheerful and friendly and when one day I brought in yarn, they helped me. I began coming in earlier during the lunch hour to join them knitting before starting my work.

Most of them had returned to work after raising children and still went home at night to cook dinners and keep house for their husbands.

Thelma was the lead clerk. Her desk was a little separated from the others, off to one side, closer to the male supervisor who sat alone in a glassed in office in the corner of the large room. She went home at night to care for both her own elderly mother and her mother-in-law who both lived with her. She laughed about the burden of caring for the "mothers", the loads of laundry and special diets.

Marta crocheted blankets for the babies of nieces and nephews and told me about her big Mexican family and the successes of her husband and brothers. Jean knit a layette set for her daughter’s third child.

Merle, a divorcee who smoked at her desk, was the most flamboyant of the bunch. She was knitting the bikini and I enjoyed her rebellious humor. She was the first knitter I knew to hold the yarn in her left hand. Doing something just a little different from the norm appealed to me and I have been knitting continental since. One day Merle quit coming to work and one of the other women whispered she had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

Jackie smoked too. She was different from the others, single, almost thirty. When the yarn came out, Jackie reached for the book she was reading and ignored the chit chat around her. She wore straight skirts and tailored shirts, unlike the soft skirts, blouses and cardigans worn by the older women. She had graduated from the university and processing invoices was not how she wanted to spend her life. She often called in sick or went home early with a headache. Many afternoons Thelma sorted through Jackie’s in-basket and gave much of its contents to me.

It was 1970, my consciousness was not yet raised. I didn’t question that the open teaching assistant position would automatically go to the male graduate student. I was glad to have found this part time job, but I knew Jackie was trapped.

I only spoke to our supervisor once. He was a pasty face young man who didn’t mix with the women. After I had been there a short while he called me into his glassed in office to tell me my work was adequate. Then he asked me if I liked the piped in music that played while we worked. He told me he arranged for it as studies showed music made employees more productive. I told him I preferred silence. I needed to tell him I didn't plan on staying.

Ene's Shawl - to frog or not to frog

2008-06-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

I am knitting Ene’s Scarf as part of a Ravelry knit along. And I’d like to quit.

The scarf starts with a horrible 375 stitch cast on! Yuck. It took what seemed like forever but I carefully counted out the cast on stitches, placing a marker after every 25 stitches. When I was done I double checked, so going into the first row I knew I had the correct number of stitches. The first row is full of double decreases. Again, I counted carefully, placed markers after every pattern repeated and at the end of the row checked carefully that there were the same number of markers on each side of the center stitch. Everything worked out.

The scarf begins with a 22 row lower edge in a simple diamond pattern. The rows are so long, it took quite a lot of knitting before I could see the pattern taking shape. No instant gratification here. Eventually I had the 22 rows knitted without too much unknitting. I counted it out as I went and knew when I’d made a mistake in time to correct it within the row. But with a 375 stitch row, if I discovered a problem because the count didn’t work out when I arrived at the center stitch, and the problem was toward the beginning of the row, there was a lot of unknitting to get back to fix it.

When I got to the end of the diamond border I realized I was one stitch off on each side of the center stitch. It was perfectly symmetrical. I’d made the same mistake on both sides. I think I missed a decrease on either side of the center stitch about 8 rows back. It looked fine, wasn’t throwing the pattern off so I decided to fix it in the very straightforward 10 row chart that followed. This chart is 9 rows of garter stitch with a yarn over knit 2 together row in between. However, there were also some decreases at the beginning and end of the rows. As simple as the second chart was, I made more errors and had 2 extra stitches on one side and 1 extra on the other. I’ll blame it on the long rows again. By the time I’d get to the end of the row, I’d forgotten what I’d planned when I began the row. Fortunately, these are the rows in which errors can be compensated for without throwing the pattern off and I ended chart 2 with the right number of stitches on both sides of the center stitch.

You’d think I’d be eager to go on to chart 3 and finish this shawl. The rows are getting shorter. I’m down to 313 stitches from the original 375. Chart 3 continues for the bulk of the shawl, the rows getting shorter and shorter all the while. So, once I get the hang of the new pattern, finishing should be easier than what I’ve done so far. In fact some knitters have called it boring.

So, why am I not eager to keep going? I don’t like the fact that I compensated for mistakes instead of correcting them. And I’m not sure I like my yarn. Yes, I know a lace shawl always looks like a crumpled mess before it is blocked. And other knitters have used the same yarn and been happy. I know this yarn will make a warm cozy scarf when it’s done. But the real problem is, I really don’t like a bottom up triangle shawl. The long lower edge is just so unruly I’m not convinced about the finished product.

I’m not going to quit! The way I see it, my choices are to frog it all and start over in another yarn or stick it out and finish this one. It would probably go much easier the second time around and I do have some beautiful slightly variegated merino lace that would be perfect for this pattern. But I really don’t want to cast on those 375 stitches all over again. I guess I’ll take a break and then later today, lay what I’ve already done out flat, pin and try to see what the yarn will look like blocked, make sure my mistakes really aren’t visible, and decide what to do next.

She Taught Me to Knit and Fixed My Mistakes

2008-06-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

I'm going to teach a friend to knit. To begin a piece of knitting, you have to cast on. That's where most knitting teachers start. But I might cast on for my friend. And I might knit the first row, too, because that's what Aunt Bobbie did for me when she taught me to knit almost fifty years ago.

Casting on is more difficult than straight knitting and the first row after the cast on can be too tight to knit easily. So, when I spent time with her one summer, Aunt Bobbie cast on and knit a few rows. Then she showed me how to hold the needles in my two hands, how to insert the right needle into the right-most stich on the left hand needle and pull a loop of yarn through.

My first attempts were full of split yarn and dropped stitches. Aunt Bobbie looked at my knitting and laughed.

"What did you do?"

Then she took it from me, unknit most of what I had done, fixed my mistakes, reknit the row and gave it back to me to start over on the next row.

Aunt Bobbie was very different from my mother. My mother was blond, blue eyed, serious and stern. Aunt Bobbie had dark hair and brown eyes, wore bright colors and seemed always to be happy and cheerful. My mother sun bathed. Aunt Bobbie covered up so she wouldn't get too dark. My mother was a good cook but Aunt Bobbie made tacos and enchiladas and served them with homemade bread, cake and pies. One summer she taught my mother and my grandmother to make earrings from watermelon seeds painted with bright red nail polish. My mother never wore nail polish.

My mother went to work when I was seven. Aunt Bobbie was a traditional housewife who should have had a house full of children. But she was just a bride when surgery made that impossible. My mother said the doctor was a butcher.

In the 1950's theirs was a mixed marriage. My aunt and uncle were not allowed to adopt. She doted on us instead.

When I was three she made me a doll that looked like me, was as big as I was, and had braids of yellow yarn. The rickrack red plaid dress with a ruffled white pinafore she made for me when I was seven was my favorite.

One Christmas she made a gingerbread house and decorated it with Necco wafers and gum drops. It was the first gingerbread house I had seen outside of a fairy tale.

The days I spent with her were fairy tale like, vacation days without chores. I was well behaved and so she rarely corrected me. By the time I was old enough to understand the pain in her life, she was gone. When I remember her, I remember her cheerful. I remember her trying to do for me whatever would make me happy. I remember her teaching me to knit and fixing my mistakes.

Swallowtail #2

2008-06-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

Swallowtail Number 2 is done! And that is a good thing because I’ve signed up for two more shawl KALs on Ravelry. I’ll be knitting another Evelyn Clark design, the Heartland Lace shawl, and Nancy Bush’s, Ena’s Shawl, found in Scarf Style from Interweave Knits.

This one was done in some Morehouse Farms Merino Lace I had in my stash for several years. I'm not real happy with the yarn. The thickness varied a lot! In places it was as thin as thread. When I finished binding off and pulled the yarn through the last stitch, the yarn broke. I had to undo about 20 stitches of bind off, attach new yarn and bind off again. And then when I pulled the yarn through the last stitch, it broke again!

But it blocked out beautifully and the color is prettier in the shawl than it was in the ball.

Blocking Lace

2008-06-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

What happened here?

Some knitters say they hate to block. I’ve even heard a few say they refuse to block, limiting themselves to patterns and yarns that don’t require blocking. Not me! I love to block because I love what it does for my knitting. I am not as good a knitter as I would like to be. My stitches are not perfectly even. My edges are not perfectly straight. This is particularly true of lace. The intricate stitches don’t lie flat and neat, the pattern is lost is a rumple of yarn that looks nothing like I intended. Blocking turns that unruly pile of yarn into beautiful knitted lace right before my eyes.

As soon as I bound off the last stitch of Swallowtail #2 I set out immediately to get it blocked. I am a fan of wet blocking. I want every bit of fiber thoroughly saturated with water to insure the blocking can work its magic. I soaked the shawl in lukewarm water in the bathroom sink with a little bit of shampoo and rinsed it with a little bit of conditioner. It is hair! After about half an hour, I drained the sink and squeezed out the excess water, first by pushing the shawl against the side of the sink and then rolling it in a big towel and squeezing the towel.

The magic comes when the shawl is laid out on the blocking boards. This time I had new soft linking mats purchased at Lowe’s. These are 24 inch square plastic mats that fit together like a jig saw puzzle, sold as a play surface in the flooring department. They come four to a package. I bought two packages and fit 5 squares together in a triangle shape on my cutting table. One side of the mats has a gridded surface. I put this side up and the grids seemed to grab and hold the damp shawl in place as I worked. Pins went easily into the pads and, because of the grip, fewer were necessary. In short order Swallowtail #2 was drying, pinned tightly on the pads.

And that’s when I saw this conspicuous hole, impossible to ignore against the playroom yellow of the blocking mat! It looks as if I tried to pick up a dropped yarnover several rows later and somehow ended up with the right number of stitches without getting all the stitches in their proper places.

But I know the shawl won’t be stretched out like this again until I have to wash it some day. And blocking had done for the shawl what I hoped it would, revealed the beauty of the pattern, evened out my stitches and gave the shawl a beautiful drape. The hole will disappear into gentle folds falling over my shoulders. I’ve decided not to see it!

Knitting In The Present Moment

2008-06-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

There always comes a time when I want the project I’m working on done so I can go on to the next one. I start making timetables and setting deadlines for myself.

“I’ll finish this section before I go to bed. I’ll do the
rest tomorrow and block it the day after,” I tell myself.

That’s what I did yesterday with my second Swallowtail Shawl. I was making good progress, had completed 14 rows of the Budding Lace 2, all that the pattern called for, but I wanted an extra 5 pattern repeats and decided yesterday was the day I’d get them done.

I started out knitting along quickly but soon realized that the third row of the pattern repeat wasn’t working. I couldn’t figure out where I’d made a mistake. I took it out a little, fixed where I thought might be a problem. But whatever problem I fixed must have been created in the unknitting and was not what needed fixing. I took it out stitch by stitch back to the very beginning of the pattern repeat, the place where I began the day’s knitting. And then I did the same thing again. And again. I surrendered and left it to sit overnight exactly as it was when I began the day’s knitting. I’d made no progress whatsoever!

Rushing knitting is a little like rushing a two-year old child. Too often what you get is a tantrum. And it really makes no sense. It would be a lot faster to bop down to Macy’s and buy a shawl.

Knitting must be done stitch by stitch. It is a spiritual discipline really. Knitting teaches me to be fully present in the here and now, not distracted by the past or concerned for the future. When I submit to its lessons, knitting each stitch in its turn, focusing on the row I’m knitting now and not the ones I’ve decided I have to get done before I go to bed, something beautiful grows in my hands.

I am a woman who wears scarves (and shawls)

2008-05-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

It is time to get rid of some clothes. Again. I’ve been taking bags of perfectly good working clothes to our women’s shelter for four years now, since taking early retirement and leaving the office. I hoped my old clothes would help another woman start a new life. I was starting a new life too, and I would not need the suits and silk blouses that were in those bags.

Our clothes express both how we see ourselves, and how we want others to see us. When I began my professional career in the late 1970s, a slightly built, young woman in a man’s profession, my clothes announced that I was serious and competent. Tailored navy blue suit. Neat silk shirts and blouses. Heeled pumps. Leather briefcase.

I had the look down but I was never entirely comfortable with that conformity. I wanted something that announced I was unique. I wanted to stand out, just a bit, not too much. I learned to wear scarves. Good quality silk or wool scarves casually tossed over my shoulders or loosely tied. I wore them almost every day.

As the years passed, my confidence grew and I learned I didn’t have to force myself into the male mold. There is a place for the feminine in the office. The lines of my suits softened. My skirts flared. I continued to wear scarves.

When I retired my life and my dress were blank canvasses. I had long empty hours not sure what to do. I gave away my work clothes but my Saturday clothes weren’t right either. My jewelry stayed in the box, my scarves in the closet.

My life filled again, caring for aging parents and new grandchildren, volunteering at work that feels important to me, knitting, sewing and growing my own vegetables. I am learning to be creative, learning to be free to fail, learning I am not dependent on success. Blue jeans replaced the navy suit, tee shirts replaced the silk blouses. Instead of neat button earrings, now my earrings dangle.

I am wearing scarves again. But it is time for the old scarves to go. Today I wear those I knit myself.

Of Nupps and Bobbles

2008-05-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Until you get the hang of them, nupps are difficult. That’s the bottom line. There are a lot of nupps in the Swallowtail and a lot of discussion among Swallowtail knitters about easier ways to make them. But I struggled through them, doing them exactly as Evelyn Clark wrote them and it wasn’t long before they were slipping easily off my needle and most of them turned out pretty well.

If you stick with Evelyn Clark’s method, here’s some advice:

· Give yourself some extra yarn for the purl 5 together. Don’t be afraid to stretch out the stitches in the k1 yo k1 yo k1 stitch. This allows you to get the right needle under all 5 strands and pull them off easily without losing one.

· When you insert the right needle under the 5 strands for your purl, pull the needle out just a bit to put a little tension on the 5 strands and smooth them out. Getting them all neat and orderly at this point will give you a nice neat, orderly nub. At this point you can also clearly see whether or not you have 5 strands on the needle and when they are all lying neatly together you are not as likely to lose one.

But now that I know I can do them Evelyn’s way, I wanted to know if there is an easier method that looks just as nice. And I wanted to know if the bobble used in the Lily of the Valley pattern in the Stitch Dictionary in Vogue Knitting would work just as well. It is done all at one time on the right side of the fabric. If I didn’t like how it turned out, I’d know right away and could redo it without having to unknit a row or more to fix it.

I made a swatch with three ways of making nupps. Reading from right to left, the first column are the nupps as written in Evelyn Clark’s pattern, that is purl 5 together; the second column are made by Slip 2, K3 tog, pass slipped 2 over; the 3rd column are Slip 3, K2 tog, pass slipped 3 over. The left most column is Vogue’s bobble, K1P1K1P1K1 in same stitch, then pass the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st stitches over the last stitch made.

There isn’t a lot of difference in the first three columns. I do think the purl 5 together, when done well, is the most attractive. However, the other two are significantly easier and for me that means more likely to be done well. My overall best results were from Slip 3, K2 tog, pass slipped 3 over. The parallel threads lie neatly over the top of the nupp and are supported by a nice fullness underneath. This will be my method of choice for next time.

I rejected the Vogue bobble although it was easiest of all. It opens up in the middle, giving the button a quite different look.

Swallowtail Shawl: Blocked and Beautiful

2008-05-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

It’s done! Although I’ve done lace before, I’d done nothing more difficult than neatly aligned yarn overs and knit 2 togethers. The Swallowtail was a challenge. I devoted many hours to knitting and unknitting.

I struggled through the three patterns, the budding lace, the nuppy lily of the valley border and the relatively easy peaked edging. After the bind off I looked at the heap of knitted yarn that was the shawl with mixed relief and dismay. This wavy, unruly thing did not look at all like the shawl I wanted to make. Had all been in vain after all? What made me think I could do this?

I knew every fiber of the yarn needed to be fully saturated if blocking were going to tame this mess. I put the unblocked shawl to soak with a little shampoo and left it in the sink and left for the hairdresser. A haircut could only help. After dinner I was ready. I squeezed out the water, stretched the damp shawl on a large towel, pinned carefully and the pattern began to pop. Success!

I should sit back, relax and enjoy the satisfaction of a challenge met. Take a walk, clean the house, read a book maybe. But there is never a time I want to knit more than I do right after one project is done. A second Swallowtail is already taking shape on my needles.

Swallowtail Shawl: Humility

2008-05-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

I have a tendency to take on too much. And so it was with the Swallowtail Shawl. I needed a project to take on vacation, something I could easily finish during a two week road trip. Knitters on Ravelry reported the Swallowtail Shawl was an easy, quick knit. One knitter said she finished it in eight hours. Not me. The vacation is over. The shawl is not finished and I’ve done more unknitting on this than on anything else I’ve ever knit.

I’d like to think I’ve been knitting for 50 years. After all, my aunt taught me when I was 9 or 10. But I don’t remember knitting more than a few inches then. I knit a few scarves in college, a blanket for my first born, two ponchos in the late ‘70s. I gave away my needles and yarn in the ‘90s and started all over again 4 years ago when I retired. I’ve knit a little lace but this was my first time to knit from a chart.

The pattern begins with a crocheted chain of waste yarn. Two stitches are picked up and knit for 6 rows, then the garter ridges are picked up, the chain is unzipped and the exposed stitches picked up. Simple enough. It took me 3 tries!

Clark’s Budding Lace, a simple 6 stitch, 6 row pattern, makes up the body of the shawl. The owner of my LYS suggested I knit a swatch of the pattern so I could see how it works. I didn’t. Instead, I knit at least 10 pattern repeats before I understood it well enough to identify a mistake in time to fix it. Once I finally got it, it was indeed simple, easy to see and follow. I did an extra five pattern repeats as suggested by Littleberry here so I could enjoy knitting once I finally understood what I was doing.

Onward to the Lily of the Valley border. I knew from posters on Ravelry that the nupps could be a challenge. A nupp is created by K1, yo, K1, yo, K1 in the same stitch on the right side and then purling all 5 together on the wrong side. Done correctly the five strands lay parallel to each other in a neat little button. I’d read all kinds of suggestions of how to do them, work on the cable of the needle, use a crochet hook, slip 2, knit 3 together, pass slipped 2 over or slip 3, knit 2 together, pass slipped 2 over. The bottom line is that they are just plain difficult. It is hard to grab all 5 stitches, hard to grab all 5 without picking up the yarn over that follows and there is no way I could figure out to fix an error from the next row and keep the button looking neat. If I found a mistake, and I found many, I had to unknit all the way back to the right side of the nupp and do it and everything after all over again.

I think I finally have the hang of the nupps. I’m working them just as written, stretching out the yarn in each of the K1s to give me lots of room to insert my needle when I purl 5 together. And so now I’m going to frog back to the Budding Lace and do them all over again.

Hopefully my next post will include a picture of a finished, Swallowtail Shawl.