Lighted Window

Blink and You'll Miss It

"It" being the magical, tiny window of time in which your child fits into something you really want to see him or her wearing.

My fault for wanting to add a hood to the BSJ, really. The sweater was done (ignoring a few loose ends and missing buttons) and too large when John was born -- and then the finished hood is nearly as large as the sweater itself -- and boom, outgrown well past getting away with a few rows added to the cuffs and hem. Guess this is destined for a sibling.

I'll be finishing it up before February 1, anyway, without further moping. I've been inspired by a handful of things: NaKniSweMo'09; Vestuary; the silly amount of yarn and an equally silly number of patterns I've acquired, all with good intentions; the cute little guy in my lap who still doesn't have any handknits from his own ma. So I will attempt to complete 12 knitted tops in the year 2009. True to form, though, I'm bending the rules to include baby sweaters, vests, and the BSJ I cast on last August (hell, I'm starting this thing with two days left in January, why not).

Fortunately this won't require much money as I've already purchased yarn for, or have stash yarn that would suit, these patterns: (heck some even have swatches already)

• Isabella
• Cardigan For Merry
• EZ's RibWarmer
• Sunrise Circle Jacket
• Ultimate Gift (hell no I didn't buy cashmere -- and I probably won't do this one)

and I have enough Falk for a stripey baby sweater, and enough Cascade Cotton Rich DK for a little cabled vest.

Wish me luck! :) If nothing else it'll be a chance to try some new things and learn a bit more.

Icebound

Ice isn't the only reason I've been virtually silent the last month... but that's for another post (observing chronological order)!

We had our first good snow when I finished up this Christmas gift, just in time for its photo shoot. Just a couple of inches. I guess that would be around December 15. (Why is the snow pink? I don't know. It was 10 AM.)

This is the Ice Queen cowl from last winter's Knitty. The minute I saw the pattern, I knew how well it would suit my mother-in-law. I finished it just in time to ship out for Christmas (and only because I took the week before baby's due date off from work).

Here's a detail -- I love the beading pattern:

To me, Kid Silk Haze is not the crack some people make it out to be, but it was pleasant slipping through my fingers. I don't recommend knitting it on Denise circulars, though. Actually I don't recommend knitting anything on a Denise circular shorter than 18", as the needle tips don't want to meet at a comfortable angle. So it probably has very little to do with the yarn.

On the 19th, we settled in for three days of snowstorm. Since then it's snowed every week, and frozen hard. When I went to take out the compost the other day, I slipped on the crust -- too thick for my weight to break through -- and fell pretty hard. So in a sense we are a bit icebound until the weather warms up (no sign of that happening this week!)

BSJ Bonanza

BSJ = Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmerman

What can I say about the BSJ that hasn't been said already?

First you knit up a weird hexagon, akin to nothing encountered in high school geometry... then you fold it a particular way, and poof!

Add a couple of seams along the shoulders, and a few buttons, and you have a very cosy and addictive baby jacket.

These were my "traveling knitting" from August through October -- well, alright, they were my only knitting except for a few desultory sock rows. They went to Alaska, Buffalo, hockey, Girl Scout meetings, friends' houses, everywhere but work and church. They are surprisingly quick to knit, in addition to their surprising topologies.

Made for, from top to bottom, Tara Shriram Fisler, our baby-still-to-come (that jacket is waiting for a hood), Liam Johnston-Worthen, and Landon Halcomb.

That concludes the baby-knitting for a bit :) Unfortunately all the WIP are Christmas gifts, so I can't post those just yet! And the main WIP, though not strictly for Christmas, isn't in a photographable location ;)

He and She Hats

The third (I think) Marsan Watchcap I've knitted, and just as satisfying as the first.

Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock Mediumweight - Midsummer Night
+ size 2 DPNs
+ the adult pattern (89 st cast on)
-------------------------------------------------
one very cozy and stretchy baby cap.

Leafy Baby Hat, using Lion Brand Baby Soft, which feels very un-soft now that I've gotten used to merino wool!

This was somewhat less satisfying -- the brim absolutely refuses to stay folded where it's supposed to. I blame the reverse stockinette section (is this an appropriate place to lay blame?) ...it's extremely rolly. The leaf edging is pretty cute, though.

These hats were knit for coworker's babies, Owen and Ava, this summer. Odd fact about the leafy hat is that I cast on for it in St. Louis, and finished it in Seattle a few hours before I arrived in Anchorage. (Not odd at all that there were a couple of months in Massachusetts in between the cast-on and bind-off.) So this hat saw the East Coast, the Midwest, California, the Pacific Northwest, and various bits of Alaska (from inside my suitcase anyway), before it ever saw a baby.

And now, there are pies to be baked and that sort of thing. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Tap tap...

Is this thing still on?

There's a bumper crop of babies this year! Ours is due to arrive sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he or she has been preceded by approximately one a month starting back in May. Here's a a big hearty welcome to Quintin, Owen, Ava, Liam, Landon, and Tara!

A warm welcome, too. The onslaught of babies has meant a lot of knitting -- at least in fits and starts (there's been a lot of bedroom-painting, gardening, and general home improvement going on around here too). In chronological order, then:

 
Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap (sorry about the hideous lighting)

This was a fun knit, although the smallest size came out a bit too small for a newborn. (No I didn't check gauge, it's a baby hat... but I will definitely knit it again in a larger size.)

To go with the hat:

 
High Energy Baby Socks -- also fun, simple, and destined to reappear. They have a knitted-in hem at the top, which I had heard of before but not yet implemented. Straightforward in both concept and execution.

I'll be posting more finished projects, and a few unfinished ones, this week. If TypePad's new (to me) editor doesn't drive me absolutely batty first. All this autosaving is slowing it way the hell down, worse than typing on a Commodore64.

Yarn Science (or Engineering)

Here I am at work, reading the technical program for the IEEE Sensors 2008 conference, when one of the papers jumps out at me:

Automatic Yarn Characterization System

Surely my eyes deceive me, "Yarn" should be "YARN", an acronym or something. But no:

"This paper presents an innovative, low cost, portable and high-precision yarn evaluation tester, entitled YSQ (Yarn System Quality), for quality control of yarn characteristics under laboratory conditions. It presents a modular format, which can integrate simultaneously yarn hairiness, mass, regularity and diameter measurements. The quantification of yarn hairiness and diameter variation (with a sampling resolution length of 1 mm), is carried out using photodiodes; the diameter characterization, based on samples with of 0.5 mm width, uses a linear photodiode array; the measurements of mass variation, based on samples of 1 mm, employs a parallel plates capacitive sensor. In the YSQ measurement parameters based on optical sensors, a coherent signal processing technique with Fourier analysis is used, to obtain a linear and consistent output signal variations. A comparison between results of the YSQ and a commercially available solution is presented."

Apparently Vitor Carvalho of Universidade do Minho, Portugal, and his colleagues have been working on this problem for a few years. There's a 2006 paper up on IEEE Xplore if you have access.

Keep Those Babies Warm

Booties for Miss Gracie Dow, born towards the end of February. While I love the look of the booties, I have some serious beef with the construction. Something so small and knit-in-the-round-able shouldn't require so many seams. I reduced the number of seams from the pattern, but still. If I do them again, I'll probably knit the strap-band first and then pick up stitches from it to knit the rest of the shoe.

This, while a much longer do, was inherently more satisfying.

It's a large baby afghan, crocheted in Lion Brand Baby Soft, begun last January and finished last month. (There was a 10-month hiatus in there.) That photo shows it folded in half. I think I will leave out the bobbles in the future, but overall the ripple pattern was very relaxing.

Here's a closeup of the stitch pattern. The picture doesn't show it well, but for half of the white sections, I used glitzy (pompadour?) Baby Soft, and for the other half, I used plain white. Just to mix things up a little.

This will probably be donated to the Lowell Wish Project or to Project Linus. While everyone I know seems to be pregnant right now, the combination of probable girls, "please no pink or blue", possible twins, likely deluge of afghans from other relatives, etc. means I'll be making something else for each of the babies.

Anti-Destiny

No matter how much I love the pattern, and how much I love the yarn...

There is some kind of anti-destiny force keeping them apart.

"Imagine" is somewhat bulkier than the yarn called for. No problem -- if I can re-math a turkey hat to use the gauge I want, I can re-math a simple top. However, apparently I can't read the instructions for a picot edge, hence the ripping back. What's worse, the yarn was discontinued when I found four skeins at the Classic Elite mill store, and no matter how hard I wish, four skeins are not going to make an Isabella. I've been searching for the yarn online (colorway 2655! anyone?), but no results -- though I did find a lovely top made by Luni -- which took seven skeins, and that really convinced me that the anti-destiny forces are at work here.

Arrrrrrrgh!

However, I finished the ripple baby blanket I started a year ago.

This is stash-neutral (had to buy yarn to finish it, and now I still have leftover yarn in exactly the same colors) so I wasn't counting it towards the stash reduction plan,  but dammit, Isabella was going to be my almost-a-sweater project for this spring. I'm going to tackle a full-on sweater this fall, with cables, and it might be good to have knitted a single wearable garment first.

Though, every time the Yarn Harlot posts about her Must Have Cardigan, the stock of Northampton yarn in "fawn" drops preciptiously (in fact it sold out pretty damn quick the last time she posted). So I'm ordering yarn for both sweaters, today. And Rowan 4-ply cotton seems to come in a similar shade of pink.

Wish me luck on that anti-destiny thing!

Developing and Debugging on the Production Line

Bang bang bang, lots of knitting getting finished before new projects get started. December was production time, baby.

Finished the last of the Christmas presents this past week, and it's the exact opposite of fire. The yarns reminded me of snow and ice and shadows on snow and ice. While swatching for the Syncopated Cap pattern, I found that long "carries" of the unused color were maddening, so I chucked the chart and made up my own, using the pattern's shaping. The results are subtle, again, much like shadows on snow. These two colors of yarn are mostly distinct, but every so often they blend into the same shade of blue, and the pattern submerges for a few stitches.

Of course, there might be a wee bit of a color dominance thing going on. I decided not to worry about it on this project, figure it out, and then exercise control on later projects (if I want to). Debugging on the production line can be quite liberating. :)

Notes:

Corrugated ribbing is way easier than it looks.

Wish I had taken closeup photos of the Clapotis' edging before I mailed it to Jane. It's perfect for the first season of Project Spectrum 2008.

Also in keeping with the element of fire: we had a small spaghetti fire last week (I missed the pot when adding dry noodles), and then last night I singed the handle of a wooden spoon (cherry? it smelled so nice while it was SMOKING). I have got to be a bit more careful working next to the stove; it's very easy for things to poke from my workspace right into the half-inch vertical gap between the pot and the range lip.

Bright Solstice, Merry Christmas

So much has been happening in the last eight weeks... much of it away from a computer.

The really short version: We closed on our house (in under 45 minutes... wow), Tim had a birthday and his brother came to town, we moved in, it snowed 6 or 8 inches, the fellas stripped wallpaper and painted and ripped out carpet while I went to work for two days of talks and poster sessions, and then they did more of the same with a little help from me. Then Tim's brother went home and we shifted down a gear, I continued to paint, Tim and I both went back to work, and there was a lot of what you might call focused effort on Christmas knitting. Oh yeah, and it dumped another foot of snow and sleet somewhere in there, too. I'm sure you've heard plenty of whining about that.

We had a few guests during the first week at our new home. Fortunately they did not come inside.

There is still work to be done on the house, but we have been having a little forced R&R by virtue of traveling to St. Louis. Tim's Mom celebrated her 60th birthday on Thursday, so we flew out early and surprised her. Flew out in another snowstorm, that is.

In weather like this, I don't have to tell you that knitting is a very pleasant, cosy pastime. It also beats hell out of sanding and painting trim. In order of finishing:

A Clapotis for my sister Jane. The color-puddling grew on me after a while, and it's more or less balanced out by the diagonal strips.

A Marsan Watchcap for Jane's husband, Joe. No photo here as I finished weaving in the ends at 5:10 pm and had to steam-block it, wrap it, box it, and get it to the post office by 6 pm, the evening before we left. Phew.

A Mitred Heart Sachet for my aunt Pauline. This was fun; the pattern was precisely written and I was always able to pick up the exact number of stitches specified, such a relief for some reason. I substituted Artyarns Ultramerino 4 for the Koigu, and I like this yarn very much. There will be more of these hearts next Christmas. (There would have been more this Christmas, but I didn't start this one till we reached cruising altitude on Thursday, and it took a couple of days at 50% effort.)

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you have been able to enjoy it in exactly the way you most needed to this year -- whether that be celebrating with a houseful of family and friends, or simply finding some Peace and Joy in your own heart. Love to you all in the coming year!