le yikes! over a month since the last post!

That's the life of an English teacher. With two kids. Often it comes down to the choice between knitting or writing about knitting. No contest.

(sorry, writing, I love you, but I do you ALL DAY LONG. Let knitting have a chance, willya? Just 'cause she's not on the SAT doesn't mean she's not important, too.)

That said, we're headed off on a road trip today and I was poking around for an easy slouchy hat pattern to do with worsted-weight yarn. I like hats for the car because they're so compact. And...I realized that all of my smaller-than-size-10 16" needles are at school because...wait for it...my 2nd period class is knitting.

Our school does a winter service project every fall, and each homeroom adopts a family (or a few kids) to support with winter clothes, school supplies, gifts, etc. I made the tiny little suggestion that we could knit our kids hats and HALF THE CLASS wants to learn. I brought 6 needles and yarn to class last week and had to play rock-paper-scissors for 5 minutes to see who "got" to learn.

How awesome is that?? I already had three students come up and ask if they could knit during class as long as they were paying attention (I told them after one more lesson if they were feeling comfortable and confident they could) and one boy (!) who already knits was assisting with the teaching!

(Lest you think I'm being a lazy teacher, we did this during our personal reading time and all of the knitters agreed to read for 45 minutes at home to make up the knitting lesson.)

So no worsted-weight-hat today (unless I can convince my ever-so-patient husband to stop at Joann on the way out of town, but even then they don't usually have 7s or 8s in stock...because they're semi-lame).

But I really don't mind.

Three more months

To my own vast surprise, I have kept up thus far on NaKniSweMoDo, aka Crazy Repetitive Stress Injury Inducing Year.

You can see in the sidebar my progress each month, the projects I've completed (OK, a few months were cheaty-ish, but not too far off the mark). Each goal--lace, seaming, cables--has been met with the giant yawning omission of one: a colorwork project.

I can't tell you how many colorwork projects I have perused on Ravelry, blogs, and in books. If I had a dollar for each one, I could have ordered all of Alice Starmore's kits plus paid for express shipping all the way from the UK. I finally decided that a colorwork sweater in a month might be too much, so I'd make a vest. I had the pattern and yarn for this one in my knitpicks shopping cart for literally five months--they kept e-mailing me hopefully, saying "The items you saved for later have now come available...hint hint." (OK, not the "hint hint" part, but the implication was there.)

I don't know what's holding me back.

But as the year draws to a close--not trying to be melodramatic here, but in less than three months it'll be 2010--this is becoming a priority.

Any suggestions for a stranded colorwork vest pattern? I'm thinking that, in the interest of time, I may want to go for sport, DK, or even worsted rather than fingering.

And while you're pondering that--check out my October project: the ubiquitous, infamous, and thoroughly well-pattern-tested Central Park Hoodie, in Jade Heather Paton's Classic Wool

The color is totally off--it's actually a beautiful heathered aqua with flecks of yellow and blue.

I can see why so many folks have made this--it's eminently practical, simple, yet fun. The easy-peasy rope cables break up the stockinette stretches. I made the first sleeve in only a few days, and finished the second sleeve last night.

I decided, after the sleeves, that I wanted to make this more challenging, or at least try something new. One goal I didn't list for NaKniSweMoDo was to steek. So I'm adapting the pattern to knit the body in the round with center front, arm, and neck steeks. I get the steek idea in theory--but as we all know, theory is far different than practice. I'll keep you updated.

Have a great week, everyone--

home-made pesto

I have a thing for basil.

I grew three different kinds this year and we enjoyed it all summer in stir-fry, pasta, and salads. I've been known just to pick it and eat it.

So, although the curly-leaf and Thai varieties were pretty much spent (I worked those plants, believe me) my hanging pot of plain old Italian basil needed to be harvested.

Hence: pesto.

No real recipe, just: chop up a whole bunch of basil into little itty bits (I don't have a food processor); add a couple spoonfuls of minced garlic (I use the "jar-lic," as my sister calls it, from Costco), and then olive oil until it's about the consistency of natural peanut butter. I didn't have any nuts, so skipped those this time, and let each person add their Parmesan individually because of some dairy sensitivities. Cook a bag of Trader Joe's brown rice spirals, toss, and serve.

Yum!

Finished Vine Yoke!

This is why I don't do the "take a picture of yourself in the bathroom mirror" photo shoot very often.

Let's think of it as "artsy" rather than "blurry," shall we?

Because, even though I sorta teach people how to take good photos...I can't hold the camera steady for the life of me. (And, in my defense, I couldn't have the flash on because it reflected off the mirror, but there wasn't quite enough light for it to work well without the flash.)

I finished this up on Monday evening last. It looked scrunched and funky:

But see how well my garter kitchener stitch turned out?

I was still a little nervous that it might not be long enough. I'm long-waisted, so I usually add .5" to 1" length to sweaters so I won't end up looking like Jennifer Aniston in the first couple of seasons of "Friends." Cropped, in the fashion sense, is a four-letter word as far as my body type is concerned. But even though the scrunched and funky sweater looked short, I decided to trust Ysolda, who insisted that she had taken the vertical stretch of garter stitch into account in the pattern.

I soaked it in the washer with some Eucalan for a half an hour, then spun out the water and spread it out to dry on a towel. I encouraged it to grow vertically, then left it to do its magic. Just like my swatch, first it grew a lot, then it shrunk back to the exact right gauge when fully dry. Woo to the hoo.

Now it's time for buttons (I was too excited to wait to take the photo above), which I've already purchased. Side note: I found them at JoAnn, and they, amazingly, match the red-orange of the yarn exactly. But they only had three cards in stock (six buttons) so I had to special-order two more. JoAnn charged me $7.95 for shipping on $5 worth of buttons. Can you believe that??

Knitting this sweater was an absolute blast. The pattern requires a lot of trust in Ysolde (and thank goodness for Ravelry, because there was an error in the sleeve math--now fixed--for a couple of the sizes, including mine; if you bought the PDF early you should have received a link to the revised pattern) and her math genius, and a couple of times I had to really think ahead and write out my pattern rows to make sure it was all going to come together at the end, but every single time: it did.

My mods were minor:

1. For the sleeves' provisional CO I used Judy's Magic Cast on with two KnitPicks needles and then just knit one direction, taking the needle tips off and holding the stitches on the KP cable for later. This worked well for the kitchenering later.
2. I increased above the yoke pattern across the back (4 sts total) to give a bit of back-neck shaping. I didn't want it to ride up. I'll report back on this one once I have the buttons on and have had the chance to wear it.

Loved it!! And--I can't believe I'm saying this--I can't wait for our indian summer to get over with so I can wear it to work. But there's no rush...

Behind the Scenes

Wow--two weeks has gone by without a post!

What have I been doing? Well, first off--I've been knitting. If June and July were rather fallow knitting months for me, I am making up for it in August...

First off, this little beauty just fell off the needles:

This is Cosima, a Berroco design that I first saw featured in the fall or winter WEBS catalog (I forget which). I bought the yarn, Berroco Cuzco in this gorgeous chocolate brown, during the WEBS anniversary sale. It sat in my stashette for a few months while I worked on other projects, and then I finally decided to cast on for it.

Thank goodness for Ravelry, because without it I would never have been able to anticipate some of the issues? challenges? weirdnesses? of this pattern, and I ended up making many modifications to mine as I went through others' comments. The pattern as written yields a very wide sweater with a really deep scoop neck. Every single size (XS to XL) uses the same number of stitches around the neck (I want to say 162? In a bulky-weight yarn?) and the descriptor "Flashdance-esque" was used more than once. I decided to err on the side of caution and picked up only about half that number, and the sweater sits really nicely on my shoulders. It doesn't have quite the same dramatic scoop as I liked in the photo, but I'd rather have it be wearable. My job is so active (I rarely sit down during my teaching periods) that I just can't have anything non-functional in the wardrobe.

Listy list about Cosima:

• My favorite part of this pattern was the lace. There is something really fun about lace in a bulky yarn.
• This was my very first sweater knit in pieces and seamed! (Not counting the little seams in baby kimonos.)
• I stayed up FAR TOO LATE last Saturday (um...3:30 am) seaming, watching Buffy, weaving in ends...and it was totally worth it.
• I'm calling it Chocolatl because of the color.
• The fronts and back are size S (the 36") and the sleeves are M.
• I added about .5"-1" to the length because of my longwaistedness.
• A full-on Eucalan-enhanced wet blocking did wonders for it. I don't have a "real" blocking board or mats so I couldn't pin it out, but I used my rotary cutting mat to facilitate stretching the pieces by hand...and, again, the extra time was totally worth it.

So: what's next on the needles? Well, take a gander at these:

What are they? Well, if you've gone through the recent Twist Collective you may recognize this baby. She deserves a whole post of her own....and with any luck, it won't take me 2 weeks to write it.

And I bought Jared Flood's Classic Elite booklet, Made in Brooklyn...and I still have Norah Gaughan 3...and it's M's turn for a sweater...

And school starts in two weeks.

It warms my heart...

It warms my heart...

to see this stack of books on my six-year-old's bedside table.

The top four he's reading on his own...

The bottom two are our "together" books. (HP is still beyond him, but he's trying.)

I love that guy.

Tubular Tropicals

These warshrags are so, like, totally awesome.

It's funny how one project can lead you down the rabbit hole to three more in quick succession. Last week I sorted through a bunch of bins of craft supplies and fabric, which also happened to contain one unfinished ballband warshrag (top left). Part of my goal was to sort all UFOs (unfinished objects) into one bin to be worked on by the end of the summer (notice I didn't say finished by the end of the summer), and, amazingly, I was able to do that (OK, mostly; some knitting stuff is in its own basket).

I have a vague memory of starting the first one. It must have been on a car trip or where I was somewhere stashless, like the doctor's office, because I ran out of black after two and a half repeats and then, inexplicably just continued the pattern using just the ombre yarn for the next three or four repeats. This looks pretty cool, but it's hard to see the slip stitches because they blend in with the bricks too much and the whole point of this pattern is that I don't have to think about it. So once I picked it back up, I decided to go for the all-out freak show and finish with the bright lime green as the background color.

I am kind of weird and obsessive about this pattern, which I have made at least 20 times, probably more--I haven't taken photos of all of them and most have gone to other people as gifts. It's one of the first patterns I made after I started knitting again in 2006 and it still makes me feel so satisfied and smart when I finish.

Hence the fact that, even though I have my log cabin blanket still in progress, and even though I had only one chart left on Ishbel, I dropped everything for three or four days and knitted three more warshrags.

#2, top right, I started right away in the lime green/pink ombre combo that finished number one. When I ran out of pink, I picked up some teal to finish off the last two rows. (Teal is real, remember?)

For #3, I decided to move on to the cool color family, and do lime green with the bright and cheery "Pool" colorway for the blocks. There's one block row of solid teal just to finish off that ball.

And, since I liked #3 so well, I reversed the colors when I started #4. Didn't like that as much, because "Pool," well, pooled in the stockinette background, or mortar, sections. So, I went full out on the train to crazytown and REVERSED the colors midway through the cloth, reverting to "Pool" bricks and green mortar.

I don't know why this project tickled me so much...probably because it was 1) fast, 2) low-pressure, 3) creative, and 4) inexpensive.