Baby sweaters

I think I may have broken my July curse and it’s safe to write a blog post. We’ll see if I make it to the end of today’s entry without messing it up somehow. Just to be safe, today’s finished items are going to be a foray back into June.

First up, the great. I really, really like this little cardigan. It’s official name is Tain’s Welcome Cardigan, for my friend’s new little baby boy; however, it could also be called the I-had-lots-of-red-Baby-Ull-and-not-so-much-of-the-other-colors cardigan.

I based it on a cardigan I saw on a little girl in Trader Joe’s. Hers was pink with multi-color striped sleeves, some sort of fluffy polyester or nylon affair, the kind of yarn that makes it look like you’re wearing a bathmat. I filed that away in my brain and came up with this when the time was right. I knitted the sleeves first, then the red body from the bottom up, then joined it all together for the raglan decreases. I added the bottom ribbing and bands at the end and used a suspended bind-off. This is my first time using it and it was a rousing success: the bands are elastic yet hold their shape. I’ll have to remember it the next time I make a top-down hat.

Mostly-matching buttons finish the look:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Dale of Norway Baby Ull, 100% superwash wool, colors 4227 (red), 5755 (blue), 2908 (orange), 5135 (purple), 2317 (yellow)
Needles: US size 2 for the body and 1 for the ribbing
Size: about 9 months
Started 4/26 and finished 6/14/2010

Next on the list, the bad. This is a very bad bad bag. It has been a WIP for more than a year and I decided to concede victory to it. Don’t let this picture fool you; it’s basted within an inch of its life with black thread, mightily distorted from its actual shape so it only looks good on this exposed side, and arranged very strategically for its photo shoot:

Pattern: Small Origami Bag by Vicki Square, as published in Folk Bags
Yarn: Artfibers Sherlock, 75% merino and 25% silk, color I (black); Artfibers Minstrel, 63% mohair, 17% wool, 20% nylon, color 4 (brown/black/gray)
Needles: US size 3
Started 12/31/2009 (actually, August 2008 but I unraveled it then) and gave up in despair 6/26/2010

The square and i-cord were easy. Then came the two little tiny seams. I sewed those over and over until the yarn was shredded, and still the shape wouldn’t come together. Forget frogging it, this one went in the trash! The guilt over throwing away Artfibers yarn went away once the lid was shut. Take that, you bad bad bag!

And now, the lucky. Remember how I said July was cursed? The month started with a clackety-clack when the DVD drive on my computer failed on Independence Day weekend. I had torte design failure (see previous post) and hit major traffic on the way home from the visit. [The good part of that weekend was re-meeting our niece, who is nearing two years old. She took to me this time. I helped her dip her toes into the ocean, we played with the toys in the toy box and I read to her. I also got to re-meet my very active step-nephew and my brother and I played some Johnny Cash together on our guitars.] Then came so much equipment and software installation failure at work that it felt I had the Technology Death Touch. Kind of like the Vulcan Death Grip, only, you know, it makes hardware sleep.

So I decided to do laundry, something I’ve had lots of practice in and can make me feel successful. Fortunately, this hat, the Bird on a Wire hat that I’m so pleased with and spent so much time on, did not take a ride in the Dryer of Doom.

Brown side!

Blue side!

I am totally charmed by how the bird faces different directions on different sides of the hat.

Brown side!

Blue side!

OK, enough of that although I could go on. Back in January, I double-knitted it only to the top of the design, then worked the two sides separately, only to find my purl side (blue side) gauge completely off. In May I ripped it back and double-knitted it all the way up to the crown shaping and now it looks good. Here are the details:

Pattern: #15 Double Knit Hat, aka the Bird on a Wire Hat, by Elli Stubenrauch, as published in Vogue Knitting, Fall 2009 issue
Yarn: Dale of Norway Baby Ull, 100% superwash wool, color 3172 (brown) and 6714 (blue)
Needles: US size 1
Size: large adult
Started 1/3 and finished 6/26/2010 (it spent some time in gauge purgatory)

Back to 2 weeks ago: when I folded the laundry I thought the pile of shirts seemed small. It didn’t click until Monday morning that all my work undershirts and camisoles were gone. Someone stopped my running dryer, rifled through my things, fished out the good stuff (never fear: the beaten-up cleaning t-shirts are all still with me) and started the cycle again. How very rude.

So on Monday I was forced to shop, not my favorite activity unless it’s yarn or I am really in the mood. Hardware/software problems continued Monday and Tuesday, and when I went through the mail Tuesday evening I heard little tapping noises in the living room. I went to the kitchen to grab a nectarine and… bees! Live bees in my kitchen! Hundreds of bees hitting the kitchen and living room windows from the outside, hence the tapping noises. Want to see?

The swarm arrived Tuesday afternoon (my downstairs neighbors were in the yard when it came and took the photo shown above out their living room window) and set up shop in a hole in the wall up at my level. That’s my kitchen window in the picture. Stray bees are getting into my kitchen somehow. The only openings I see are tiny cracks around the tightly-closed window so I stuffed those with paper towels and still they get in. This is day 13 of BeeWatch 2010, with anywhere from 5 to 25 individuals in my kitchen during daylight hours. The first couple of hours after they arrive they are angrily buzzing against the window, trying to get out. So I don’t go in there until it’s been quiet for at least 20 minutes and I feel it’s safe to vacuum them up (I know, bad karma), meaning I don’t get to eat dinner until 8:30pm.

On sunny days they’re really active. I made my own Bee Movie from my living room last weekend:

The bee service finally came 2 days ago to remove the hive. They saw through the outer wall, find the queen and stick her in a hive box, then get the rest of the hive in there, and later patch up the wall. You don’t want to exterminate because bees perform a very important role and several pounds of dead bees are very stinky, but you do have to get them out because the honey and wax can do serious building damage. All this activity stirred up the bees and I had a high bee count Friday night. Rather than face the kitchen’s guests yet again, I went out to dinner. I’ve gotten very jumpy whenever a small fly or a piece of lint drifts into my field of vision. The first 10 days I was able to face them but the last two nights my courage failed me completely. My very brave next door neighbor rescued me last night.

It’s just about lunchtime and I don’t hear any buzzing so it’s safe to make a proper meal, I hope. Maybe all the extra duct tape I put around the kitchen window’s seams early this morning is doing the trick. Although when I look out the window, no one’s going in or out of the opening in the side of the house, so maybe it’s too cold or they’ve given up on finding their hive here.

Either way, I am so grateful for a bee-free kitchen that I can hardly stand it and the first pair of socks for my mom is coming along. Perhaps my July curse is broken.

Tomorrow is Stitch & Pitch (go Giants!). I always wonder what it would be called for other hobbies. For weavers: Weave & Heave, kayakers: Row & Throw, tatters: Tat & Bat, bicyclists: Ride & Slide. Ha!

I am very busy cleaning out closets and drawers in preparation for an eventual move and in my rummaging I found two children’s sweaters knitted by my great-grandmother. It’s time to go back 30 years!

My mom’s grandmother flew across the big ocean to visit us in the United States only once, back in 1979 in the weeks before my little brother was born. Now, I’ve never had children, but I can just imagine the fortitude it takes for an expectant mother to go to Disneyland in August less than 2 weeks before her baby is born. My mother did, though, although I doubt she rode the Matterhorn. In between doing touristy stuff and in the weeks after my brother was born, Oma had a lot of time to kill in the house and, fortunately, Thrifty Drug Store had a lot of acrylic yarn. She knitted us a great big afghan for the sofa. And also some little sweaters.

Here’s mine:

That strip on the bottom where the maroon stripe is especially wide and a little off-kilter is the extension. She knitted the sweater to an appropriate length for me, then knitted a separate extension and left that with my mother, who sewed it on sometime in the future so I’d get more wear out of the sweater.

My new little brother got an ensemble:

The hat is formed with garter stitch short rows. The ties on the sweater’s side were to narrow it to fit him when he was a little too small for it and to allow for growth as he approached growing out of it. I have to say Oma could really make a mean tassel and cord.

I’m rather disappointed that there isn’t any avocado or true harvest gold here but perhaps that is for the best.

The last couple of months have been very difficult and strange, for me impossible to put fully into words. I pretty much abandoned the blog here simply because it’s hard to get my thoughts in order. I also didn’t want Matt’s photos to no longer be on the first page of Mmm… Yarn or my Flickr account but now that I finally printed and framed a few photos it’s OK and I’m no longer freaking out at the thought of those no longer being first in those places. Having all digital photos means I don’t put in the effort of printing and framing anymore so there were no photos of him or us anywhere. On a side note, I learned you can take screen shots with the iPhone, which allowed me to keep a screen shot of our last text message exchange as a .jpg file, which means I’m also no longer freaking out over his phone’s battery going dead or getting some software update that deletes saved stuff.

My brain is all over the place and rambling thoughts abound. I do go to work 4 days a week, off Wednesdays, and thank goodness we are now busy with a computer lease turnover and an upgrade to Office 2007. Both of these projects can focus my mind for the duration of the workday. Then I go home and it’s rambling time again.

But back to the blog. For a while I had nothing to show you here as I did not have any knitting mojo for a little over a month after he died. Since then I have been able to concentrate enough to knit simple projects and even a few not so simple ones but haven’t had the wherewithal for dealing with photographing, writing down my notes (now of course all forgotten anyway), and getting things up on the blog.

So, here is the first object that I managed to finish and photograph, the baby sweater you saw back in early May. Last month I wove in its 10 remaining yarn ends and sewed on the buttons; I even mailed it off to its little (and growing) recipient.

Pattern: own
Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Organic Cotton, 100% cotton, .75 skeins color 632 (dark blue), .65 skeins color 630 (mint green), .25 skeins color 80 (off-white)
Buttons: from stash (I have these in several colors and really like them)
Needles: size 6
Size: 6-9 months
Started 5/5 and finished 6/10/2009

I did not hear from the parents whether they received it at all and therefore do not know whether it fits or they like it. This has happened to me with I’d say 80% of the things I’ve mailed off, gifts that I did not give in person. I don’t take it personally as I know new parents are busy and frazzled and probably use baby’s naptime to quickly nap themselves or try to get something done in the house, but I still find it disheartening to not at least get an email saying “it arrived.”

Somehow I thought a new baby sweater would take me at least a few weeks. Sometimes they take me a few months. But not this time. On Tuesday night I swatched. By Friday I had finished the back of the sweater:

Tonight (Sunday), it’s already looking like this:

And it’s not like I spent huge blocks of time just knitting over the weekend. We had our usual weekend errands. We cooked and we made little honey cakes. We went for walks in the park both days. Yesterday I briefly re-created Old Faithful in our very own bathroom: why, oh why, did the instructions for the replacement toilet valve not say to turn off the water source before step 1? Or even in step 1? Thank goodness Mr. MmmYarn ran as fast as he did when I hollered; saved me some major mopping. And my repair worked just fine after the geyser ceased. I helped him warp on for a new scarf today. We called our moms (did you?). We went yarn shopping (in the interest of full disclosure… the trip was for Mr. MmmYarn so he could replenish his weaving stash, but I bought some too, of course). All of these little things add up to a big list of things we did, yet this weekend was easy and actually relaxing and the baby sweater, another little thing, just flowed into being. Perhaps it was the size 6 needles, huge compared to what I’ve been using recently, that made this one such a joy.

If the sweater is dry tomorrow, I can seam it and knit the collar. Yeehaw.

Whew, the orange and yellow baby sweater is finally done and since I mailed it Saturday, the recipient should have it already.

Pattern: own, percentages based on Elizabeth Zimmermann’s February Baby Sweater
Yarn: Wolle Rödel Baby-Merino, 100% superwash merino wool, 3 skeins color 13075 (orange), 1 skein color 13065 (yellow)
Needles: size 2 for body, size 1 for buttonband
Size: 6 months
Started 1/2 and finished 3/2/2009

I made the little flecks at the bottom reverse direction at the center back by making little fleur-de-lis-looking things:

I like how the sleeves belled out a little at the cuffs and the swoop leading up to the button at the bottom of the front. The buttonband is an attached i-cord. The photo doesn’t do this sweater justice as it got a little wonky in blocking, making it look like the sleeves didn’t line up quite right. They are a bit tight at the armhole, I think, but without a little person here I’m not sure. Next time I might make underarm gussets so they lie a little more naturally.

This is always a good sign:

Terrible picture, but exciting that it’s all blocking.

Waiting is a big theme in the MmmYarn household these days. It’s not all bad. It turns out time spent waiting translates into quite a bit of knitting time. I took advantage of the brief period of sunshine through heavy rain clouds this morning and took photos to share.

The baby sweater nears completion:

I did finish knitting the lower band today and the sweater is officially off the needles as of early this afternoon. Now comes the sewing up of the sleeve seams, the weaving in of ends, and the creation of an i-cord edge with buttonholes along the two fronts. Ugh. Most likely followed by button shopping (much more fun than creating the holes); I haven’t checked the button stash but if memory serves I have nothing that will work with this coloring. This means I might need to go to the yarn shop because I don’t want to wait until Stitches West to send this sweater off to its continually growing recipient. Oh, the torture. Because I can’t buy anything but buttons at the yarn shop because I am still on a self-imposed knit-from-the-stash diet, with an exception for Stitches West, where I typically end up buying from the local shops’ booths anyway. It’s a strange logic.

Time flies when you’re knitting, and the Sweater Girl Pullover is well beyond the swatching stage:

Those safety pins up the right side of the back are marking where I added waist shaping that’s not in the pattern. Perhaps leaving those pins there will help me to remember to add the same shaping to the front. Perhaps if I write about the plan here that will reinforce it in my Swiss-cheese brain. You think? And yes, I nearly always knit sleeves two at a time when they are worked flat. It’s the only way I can be sure I’m duplicating the shaping.

Oh, and I may have done a little plying this week. Yarn, however, is still on the bobbin and not yet skeined:

Waiting took on another form a few months ago when I ordered a book I was sure would be fabulous. I got impatient, checking to see when it would be released and when it would be shipped on a regular basis. But you can’t rush these things and it finally surprised me by arriving last week. I wasn’t wrong about its fabulous-ness, and this sure is some great retail therapy, courtesy of the talented Nancy Bush:

Mmm… nupps. I do like the look of nupps and even enjoyed their execution when I made the Lily of the Valley shawl. I am looking forward to eventually working some patterns out of this one. First I have to read it, though; haven’t had time to really peruse it yet.

I indulged in a little more this week. The reward, me mateys, is my very own pirate-ish YARRRN t-shirt:

Mr. MmmYarn and I decided to stay in for Valentine’s Day this year. Lots of the knitting blogs I read posted something heart-shaped or red today. I give you, instead, Beef Braised in Ale on noodles alongside red cabbage with cranberries:

Hey, at least the side dish is in the pink/purple/red color family. We also indulged in red wine. Yum. Happy Valentine’s Day, all! I hope you are as lucky as I am and can spend it with someone special.

Happy Groundhog Day! I took a vacation day today simply to try to catch up with life a little. Due to circumstances beyond our control, neither Mr. MmmYarn nor I got a weekend this weekend, nor did we get much of a long weekend last week. Today I realized it has been ages since I’ve posted. I don’t have too much finished work to show for this big posting gap, but I’ve definitely been practicing various fiber arts.

Finished item #1, a hat:

Pattern: own, 3×3 spiral rib made on 61 stitches (a multiple of 6 plus 1 to create a right-leaning spiral)
Yarn: 4 ounces of handspun Widdershin Woolworks merino wool
Needles: size 10 (plus a little of size 9 at the very top as it turns out I have no size 10 double-points)
Size: adult
Started 1/23 and finished 1/26/2009

I am very proud of this as it is the first garment I have knit from my handspun. So far, handspun yarn has been relegated to a special section of the stash, the part I don’t knit from. I came to the conclusion: what’s the point of having this yarn if I don’t use it? This stuff is early spinning, probably made in 2000 or 2001. Bulky and uneven, but it sure made a nice hat:

I made hardly any progress at all on the baby cardigan since it went to Stow Lake. The sleeves were truly terrible. Here is a blocking photo from a week ago that I never got around to getting posted here:

Look how big those dots are in the sleeves! I’m working the body on size 2 Addi Turbos and for ease of working I switched to Susan Bates short double-points (with a rubber band on each end to make straight needles) for the sleeves, which completely changed my gauge. The sleeve fabric was totally floppy, nothing like the body. Since I took this photo last week, I have ripped out and re-knit both sleeves, this time on the Addis, and am now chugging away at the body. The sleeves’ gauge is far more satisfactory. I blocked them again just to be sure.

Finished item #2: I had this idea in my head a long time, that as a quasi-environmentalist it’s really shameful that I waste one cardboard sleeve on my teacup every Monday night at knitting group, so I cut a strip off a failed felted bag and needle-felted together a cup holder.

Failed bag with bizarrely wide strap and bizarrely narrow flap:

And voila, a cup holder:

Pattern: took apart a cardboard holder, traced it onto already-felted bag, cut out basic shape, needle felted together, put the cardboard holder in the recycling bin
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Bulky, 85% wool, 15% mohair
Started and finished 1/25/2009

Of course, three of the felting needles were broken after my last adventure with needle felting and I did not remember where I put the replacements until this item was finished. Grrr. At least I know now I do not need to buy more replacements at Stitches West at the end of this month. And the next needle felting project will go far more quickly with a full complement of needles. When I used this last week, the cafe owner asked if I could make one and put the cafe’s logo on it. Uh… I kind of weaseled out of that one. I don’t see myself going into mass production on these.

I swatched with some lovely Rowan Kidsilk Night for the Sweater Girl Pullover:

However, the swatch lied despite my doing everything you’re supposed to do (wash and dry, hang a bit), and the 5″ of sweater I managed to crank out this weekend I ended up ripping out today because the work was too wide. Ripping is hard in this yarn. I cannot rip the waistband part but managed to re-use the rest of the yarn. This morning I cast on again with fewer stitches and have a whole 8 finished rows to show for it. Whoop-de-do. The Kidsilk yarn is fabulous, though. I can see why it’s known as Kidsilk Crack.

Spinning took place, too. I finished the last bit of purple for the purple and orange 4-ply last night. I’m deciding whether I have time to ply it now before heading to knitting group in an hour.

And wrapping things up, I finally was able to part with the way-too-big-for-me sweater. It’s on its way to its new home with the Cheyenne River Reservation youth project in South Dakota. They need warm, natural fiber sweaters and large ones are welcomed. This one’s Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted and has a 48″ chest:

Besides the hugeness of it (huge due to delusions about body size for the first 10 years or so after I learned to knit even though it is the correct size as dictated by the pattern), the colors simply don’t flatter me, so I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t rip this and re-knit it. I hung on to it a long time, unable to let go of something I put so much effort into. I was able to very peacefully send it on its way on Saturday with nary a regret. Nice.

Warm, sunny, practically windless weather continues, so today I went for a long walk in Golden Gate Park. Once I reached Stow Lake, I took a break and worked a little on the orange and yellow cardigan. This is it, dangling by one two-thirds done sleeve, enjoying a view of the Chinese Pavilion:

After several attempts at knitting the sleeves in the round, I gave up and decided to go flat. Stranding that tiny circumference on small needles just wasn’t working for me.

I made relatively good progress on the orange and yellow baby cardigan during the past week, but tonight ripped back to the 8th row after test blocking today:

See that puckering just below the garter stitch yoke? Even blocking will not fix that. It means I need to make the yoke deeper before each round of increases to avoid it. Sigh. The good news is that I really like the polka dots.