Lewis

Shawl-Collared Vest

In the Middle of it All

As a non-shoveling person, I am looking forward to the predicted snowstorm with perverse pleasure. "Thunderstorms and heavy snow with heavier bursts near thunderstorms." It sounds gorgeous.

And for those of you cursing, remember: It's March. It will melt. Hopefully not into your basement.

I'm in the middle of a plethora of knitting projects, too, as usual. I semi-finished a fingerless glove in Louisa Harding's Kimono Angora Pure. (Semi-finished means that I have yet to knit the thumb.) If the spirit moves me, I may even knit the other one. I found the angora surprisingly tricky to knit with. You have to maintain quite tight tension to keep it from looking loopy and uneven, but the yarn is delicate, and will pull apart if you crank too hard on it. It's cozy to wear, though ... or will be, when I finsh the thumb.

I am about 10" into a vest designed by Meg Swansen, the Shawl-Collared Vest. For anyone who thinks that knitting goddesses like myself don't make mistakes or have trouble, consider that I had to start the project over three times. I had gauge problems, and I didn't like a few of the design elements. Now it's clicking right along, or I'm clicking right along, with only 4" left till I get to the armholes and various exciting shaping changes come into play.

My Sonoma Mountain Wrap is resting while I energize myself to rip out the applied I-cord border and re-do it. I don't mind too much; I enjoy doing applied I-cord. It has a nice rhythm, and it's relatively mindless so I can Think Great Thoughts while I do it. But one does have to mentally prepare oneself to rip out over 60" of work.

I have been doing less papercrafting / card-making this week because I have been felled by MWNBAGAH Syndrome, or Mine Will Never Be as Good as Hers. My maniacal card-crafting friend L. has been in a frenzy of creativity, and recently won the Hero Arts [rubber stamp company] Fresh Face challenge on their blog. Go to www.heroarts.com and click on Blog to see. (You have to scroll pretty far down to get to her Froggie Friends card). Her creativity blows me away, so it's hard for little ole me to create in her presence.

I always tell my students not to compare themselves to others. There will always be someone better than you, and if you're going to let that stop you, you'll end up hunkered down in a hole in the ground mumbling to yourself. Or working at McDonald's. It's great advice. Now why can't I follow it?

Have a lovely day, don't get stuck in the snow (if you're here in ND, SD, MN, IA or environs) and always remember: Variety is the Cheese of Life.

Back Again

I have been indulging my habits: knitting, papercrafting, eating. And I do mean indulging. My wallet is slimming in inverse proportion to my waistline.

I went to the Bohus knitting exhibit at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis today. The photos in Wendy Keele's book Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition are stunning, so I wasn't prepared for how much more stunning the real items would be. Using gradations of color, and clever positioning of knits and purls to bring some areas forward and push other areas back, the designs positively glow. (One complaint I have about the mounting of the exhibit is that some of the items are not properly lighted, but the sweaters themselves almost give off light.)

Some of the sweaters in the show are knitted to a gauge so fine it boggles the mind. I think the Pink Lace Collar is knit at about 38 stitches over 4 inches. Can you imagine knitting an entire sweater -- mostly stockinette -- at that gauge?

I bought a kit for the Blue Shimmer hat and scarf set. My wallet took a large weight loss on that, so now I am home snacking on Walgreen's Spice Drops. I went looking for Brach's spice-flavored jelly beans today, but no stores have their Easter candy out yet. Come on, folks, Valentine's Day is over! What are you waiting for?

A digression about candy: have you ever encountered a gumdrop, jelly bean, Skittle, or the like that is misshapen or oddly-colored? Do you find these "mutants" too scary to eat, as I do? There was a tiny gumdrop in the bag I'm working on now; I couldn't eat it. It's cruel to eat the baby ones!

Having splurged on the Bohus kit wouldn't have been so bad, but I've been spending a lot on paper-crafting supplies lately. My friend told me about Copic art markers. Not only can you do lots of nice effects with them, but they come in sets. If a thing is good, a set of those things is better to the 10th power. Along with the Rapture of the Tiny (anything miniature is cool), the Rapture of the Set is strong.

I have been playing around making greeting cards. I make cards not so much to send them, but more to play with color, texture, and composition. If I can use the card at some time, great, but as with my knitting, Process is all. My papercrafting friend L. and I are under the thrall of the Scallop right now. Scalloped borders, scalloped ovals, scalloped circles, scalloped rectangles ... I went to Archiver's and bought every scalloped punch, die, and paper shape they had. Oops.

KNITTING UPDATE

I have finished knitting the Sonoma Mountain Wrap (from Simply Shetland Book 2, design by Carol Lapin). I am just finishing the border. The pattern called for a crocheted border, but I couldn't get it to look good, so I'm doing an applied I-cord border, which is working out well. Abby at Borealis advised me to work it from the wrong side, which I hadn't been doing, so I'm going to rip out the part I've completed and re-do it. Apparently if you work it from the right side, eventually it separates a little and the underlying edge shows through. Who knew. (Well, Abby, obviously).

I knit a whole bunch of scarves, hats, and a couple pairs of mittens over the winter. I made a woven/knitted scarf from Exquisite Little Knits and a double-knit-with-tw0-yarns scarf from the same book. And I knit a number of hat/scarf sets for charity, and some mittens for charity, from Carol Anderson's Projects for Community Knitting.

I made myself a sort of serpentine short-row scarf out of Noro's Transitions yarn, and a chunky garter-stitch scarf from Kochoran. I now have enough scarves to insulate my house. My favorite cashmere scarf tried to jump ship (er, car) by leaping out of the car onto the ground in the parking lot at the St. Anthony Culver's, (maybe it wanted a Butterburger?) but it sent out vibes of remorse and I left the restaurant to look by the car based on an uneasy feeling I had. I rescued it before it got run over and ground into the slush.

I suppose I've started and set aside a bunch of other projects which I've forgotten about for the moment: too bad. I do not apologize for starting new projects whenever the whim hits me.

Speaking of which, I am currently working on Elizabeth Zimmermann / Meg Swansen's Shawl Collared Vest from Knitting With Meg Swansen. I fiddled with the pattern a bit and had several false starts. Lesson re-learned: swatch in the round when you are going to knit in the round. Your gauge can change a lot. (Like ending up with a sweater 7" smaller than intended. Oops.) The vest is knit in the round and steeked. I can't wait for the cutting part!

I promise you some photographs. Some day. Of something.

Parrot House

Those Lazy Days of Summer ... and Fall ... and Winter ... and Spring ...

I remember going to Girl Scout camp in the summer when I was in grade school and junior high. It was like being in another world for two weeks, with different food, different rules, life mostly out-of-doors, sleeping in cabins or under the stars, mosquito bites and dirty hair and cold showers once a week. New tribes of friends formed. We had girl-crushes on counselors.

I was allowed to take the family's Kodak Instamatic camera to camp. It was newfangled; the flash was built right in and you didn't have to carry flashbulbs (those somewhat-scary bulbs you plugged in with a cuplike reflector behind, and when the bulb went off -- which it didn't always, some of them being "duds" -- there was a loud "pop!" and you stood blinking with bright blue spots before your eyes.

Then there was the wait while you sent your film off to Brown Photo in a special envelope. A week or two later, your black-and-white pictures would arrive (color wasn't widely available yet, and was expensive) along with the negatives. You'd open the packet with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Would they be good? Or would you have 12 or 24 or 36 pictures of your thumb or the inside of your duffel bag?

Now, of course, we have instant access to photos. Digital cameras let us see our shots immediately, and we can print them at home. So there should be no reason why photos are not readily available, right?

Ah, but you would be underestimating my laziness if you agreed with that. I would have been blogging so much more if only I could rouse myself from my stupor and open up the camera, pull out the memory card, put it in the card reader, plug the card reader into my computer, and upload the photos.

The moon must be in a beneficial phase, because I took these pictures (above) and then proceeded straight to the computer and did the do.

The project is called Parrot House, and it's from Lavish Lace by Carol Rasmussen Noble and Cheryl Potter ... sort of. There is what I believe to be an error in the pattern, and there's a bit I didn't like, so I changed it a little. But it's essentially the same big scarf / wrap. I'm doing it in Araucania Nature Wool Chunky, which I love. It's springy and meaty and easy to knit with. I'm enjoying knitting the project immensely, now that I've got past the difficulties in the pattern. The pattern is fairly easy to memorize, too, so it's good TV knitting.

Overall, I'm not pleased with the book Lavish Lace. The first project I knit from the book, Frost Flowers, had multiple pattern errors. I had to write to Martingale Press twice to report all the errors I found. Now, as I said, in Parrot House, there was also an error. Though I've gone back to the Martingale website multiple times, there are no more errata posted. It makes me reluctant to knit any more designs from this book without demanding a proofreader's fee.

Also, because the projects are lace done in variegated yarns, they seem to work best not only in the specific yarn and colorway photographed, but in some cases, in a particular Potluck dye lot which can never be found again. (The authors are the creative team behind Cherry Tree Hill yarns, and the projects are designed in these yarns.) It's very difficult to find the exact yarn that will work for a given project. There is much discussion in the book about how the yarns and colorways were chosen for the designs, but it only serves to convince me that it's best to stick to those exact yarns / colors.

I nearly drove myself to the Nut House (not the Parrot House) finding yarn that would work for this project. The scarf in the book was done in a Potluck (i.e. one-of-a-kind) Worsted Six-Pack. Every Worsted Six-Pack I considered would have been too busy for this cabled lace pattern. (In fact, I'm not sure I even like the one they chose for the book). The Araucania Nature Wool Chunky is working well, but not until I scoured my LYS and the Internet to get enough hanks in the correct color, which, of course, seems now to have been discontinued or at any rate seems to be unavailable.

That is my rant for today. Now I'm going to sink back into my couch like the true Potato that I am and knit. (Ahhhh ...)

Ahhh ...vacation ...

I spent the past week at Arrowwood Resort in Alexandria, MN sitting by the pool, looking at Lake Darling, swimming, reading, knitting, playing with my favorite 6-year-old, and eating about six meals a day. The onion rings at the cafe at the resort are excellent, and I ate a lot of them. The extra weight will help with flotation, I'm sure.

My mango Crocs enjoyed paddling in the foam at the edge of Lake Darling.

That squished blue ball of yarn you see under my arm in the photo above is going to be a sample baby sweater for my Lola Baby Bolero class (see the Classes tab at www.borealisyarn.com). This blue one will be an adapted, more "boy-looking"version with a straight bottom front instead of the curved fronts for the more girly version. The red one in the store is the original version with the curved fronts. The adaptation will be only available in my class as an addendum to the original pattern; you can't knit the whole sweater from the addendum.

I brought Shadow Shawl #3 with me to the lake, but as it needs some ripping and re-knitting, I didn't work on it. Not the most relaxing thing to bring on vacation, in retrospect.

I went to the State Fair yesterday and looked at all the knitwear in the Creative Activities building. Congrats to Katie and Jean and Paul for their awards. (Jean: you was robbed on the yellow/green/etc. shawl).

I've now eaten my annual quota of cheese curds, footlong hot dogs (OK, my sister and I shared one, so I guess I only had 6 inches), Pronto Pups, and other good-and-good-for-you foods. Some random Fair hints:

1. Go to Dino's Gyros if you want to sit down to eat. Yesterday there were about 75 people waiting to get into the Whatsis Dining Hall, but Dino's was mostly empty. And their gyros are really good.

2. Warning: the big hunk of bacon on a stick thing that's been hyped this year is maple bacon. Ewwwww .... at least to my taste. I'm a traditionalist when it comes to bacon and the sweet stuff should stay on its own stick.

3. Both the DFL booth and the Obama booth were rather disappointing; we were looking for bumper stickers or car magnets but all the Obama booth had were t-shirts, cardboard rally signs, and buttons. The DFL booth had even less Obama stuff. I'd say they really missed an opportunity. If you're tired, hot, grumpy with humanity, and at the end of your Fair visit, don't walk for blocks to visit the Obama booth, as we did. It's out of the way, hard to find, and about the size of a lemonade stand.

4. OK, cows give milk, but why is the Moo Booth situated in the stink zone of the Dairy Barn? Just as I don't like sweet stuff on my bacon, I don't really like to smell manure while I'm eating ice cream.

5. Park and Ride. We do it every year and it's awesome. The lot across the street from the 4th St. Ramp at the U of M (near 4th St. and 17th Ave.) is free and the bus ride takes under 10 min. There's no waiting for a bus, usually.

6. There's a horrible, loud, Hammond Organ machine in the Creative Activities Building this year. However, it only runs for about 5 minutes every hour. (Otherwise, I would have had to run out screaming in front of a Clydesdale.)

Maybe now that it is starting to feel a little more like fall I'll be knitting more ... ?

Fall classes

My fall classes will be posted on www.borealisyarn.com by August 25.

My planned classes are:

How to read a pattern (1 session)

How to fix mistakes (1 session)

Lola Baby Bolero (2 sessions)

Two toe-up socks at a time on the Magic Loop (3 sessions)

I don't have dates yet; check on the Borealis website or at the store.

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My favorite recent quote from my favorite soon-to-be-six-year-old:

We were driving past a gas station at which the workers were changing the price sign. I thought she might enjoy looking at the workers manipulating the magnetic numbers with their long pole, so I pointed this out to her. Her reply: "Don't you worry. Al Franken is going to take care of all of that for us."