Book recommendations

I love to get recommendations from friends! I'm cheap, so buy books infrequently (less often than yarn; more often than new clothes) but if a friend recommends something, I'm usually in. And you know that as an English teacher I am pickier than your average bear! Not just any pick-a-nic basket for this girl. I must fall in love with the book to stay with it.

My friend Katie over at One Scheme of Happiness is having a book recommendation contest, so go and visit before noon on the 11th (it's my birthday on the 11th, btw, so I hope that helps me win) and recommend books to the knitblogging world!

Here are the three I recommended. I have read and reread them and loaned them out and bought each of them at least twice because the loaned-out copies didn't return to me and so you KNOW they must be good.

1. The Highest Tide, by Jim Lynch. A great book set in the Pacific Northwest--sort of Holden Caufield meets Snow Falling on Cedars.

2. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. Came out a few years ago; a mix of sci-fi, lit-fic, and heartbreak. You will never feel the same about space travel, love, anthropology, or religion again.

3. Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos. Set in Seattle. (I guess I'm feeling the need to push Northwest writers.) Amazing imagery. Manages to tie together some stuff you'd never think possible. Lovely.

And need I mention summer is the perfect time to reread Harry Potter?????

Definitions of reality

Twin Mariner Baby Beanies
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

Some friends of mine just adopted twin infants from Ethiopia. I visited yesterday, and after listening to their story--of traveling, of food poisoning, of unexpected medical tests and celebrations and long flights--I wondered, in awe of their strength and of these two beautiful children, who defines what makes a "real" parent? Becoming adoptive parents, they labored just as long and hard as I did becoming a biological mom. Some of the best parents I know aren't traditional--they're adoptive, or step, or even just honorary. Sounds cheesy, but it's the love and the commitment that makes the difference.

So I made these hats for the twinnies, to celebrate their joining our community. They're nearly identical, but not quite...

I'm also stepping out myself these days, joining a few more communities of my own, trying to make some more connections and have a little fun. There's a new button on my sidebar now, for a group I've joined, and I may be sharing some blog entries here with a young Hogwarts student named Hydrangea MacDuff. Hydrangea may get her own blog--we'll see how much she feels like writing.

Hat Fair 2008

Hat Fair 2008
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

Hats. Some swear by socks as their small project of choice, and, I agree, a sock is nice and portable. But, for me, a simple hat is the perfect thing to tuck away in my purse or travel bag. Something with a nice easy stitch or color pattern--ribbing, cables, stripes--something that fits on a 16" needle or 2 circs at most.

here's a parade of the hats I've made over the past few months. (Missing are 3 baby hats that didn't get documented, all adaptations of the Basic Cable pattern from Stitch 'n' Bitch nation. Excuse my Yoda syntax.)

Top-to-bottom, left-to-right:

1. Black Irish, my second iteration of the Celtic Cap by The Girl From Auntie., made for my husband. You can't see it in this photo, but it has a lovely celtic knot cable (you CAN see the cable in my ravelry photos). I think I like this pattern better with the hem than the roll-brim; I'm thinking of going back and adding the hem to my green one. Yarn: Cascade 220 Superwash left over from my Stefanie Japel shrug.

2. My child-size version of the Skull Cap by Gina of Knits Two Together. (This is a free pattern.) A huge hit with my five-year-old! Yarn: Patons Classic Merino + 2 colors of Cascade 220. I hadn't done any colorwork for a while and this went really fast, I guess in part because of the large gauge.

3. An adapted version of Basic Cable from Stitch 'n' Bitch Nation in Patons Soy-Wool-Stripes, made for ME! I love everything about this hat. It is cheery, warm, not too itchy, and fits just right. The only thing I adapted was the cable; I had just finished 3 other versions of this same hat (the aforementioned UnDocumented Finished Objects, or UDFOs) and wanted something different, so instead of the six-stitch rope cable in the pattern, I used a six-stitch horseshoe cable from the Vogue Stitchionary volume 2. For some reason the book only has the pattern written out, not charted (a pet peeve of mine with some knitting books--EVERYTHING should be charted, IMHO) so i charted it myself, folded up the chart so it would fit in my accessories bag, and have made 4 of these hats this year.

4, 5, and 6/7: are all improvised kid beanies. 4 is two-tone red, in Aurora 8 and Patons Classic--using up leftovers. 5 and 6/7 are all various colors of Plymouth Encore. 4 is over 80 sts, 5 is over 72, and 6/7 are over 64. 6&7 are for a friend's twins she's adopting from Ethiopia; the other two are worn by my own personal rugrats. Mr. D loves the red one--it fits really closely. The two-tone wasn't the plan, but it does look awesome--not only are the reds just slightly different, the textures are different, too, which makes it look very sleek and modern. Aurora 8 is soft and almost slippery, while the Patons is traditional and wooly.

Next up: Three more Basic Cables for my yearbook editors' graduation gifts--they're all going off to college in cold climates, go figure.

So now you know what I keep in my purse along with the wallet, cell phone, and tampons...
What is your favorite kind of take-along knitting project?

Climb the Trellis

trellis2
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

Here's the start of my French Trellis scarf from Victorian Lace Today.

Even if you're not a lace knitter--and I'm certainly no expert, just an advanced beginner with a couple of projects under my belt--you will love to look at this book. The history...the photography...the lovely projects from simple to crazy-hard...Mine was a library copy, but I've got it on my wish list!

The knitting is going well, and I'm using my new KnitPicks Harmony Options wood needles, which is much better than using metal like I did for the Mystery Stole. Plus the colors--both of the needles and of the yarn--make me very happy.

I'll be interested to see how the Gloss Lace looks once it's been blocked; so far it's not as soft as the Zephyr, but has nice stitch definition and is not rough by any stretch of the imagination. The sheen of the silk really makes the pattern glow.

This is my first lace project that incorporates YOs on both sides and though that means I actually have to pay attention on the WS rows, rather than simply purling back, it's fun to learn a new skill. I loves me some charts, and Sowerby's are clear and easily readable.

The construction of the scarf is also interesting; what you see in the photo is one END of the scarf, which you work sideways. Then you PU a row of slipped sts from one end (you can see the little loopies at the top of the photo) and work the middle of the scarf, finishing off with working the other end sideways & attaching it simultaneously to the middle. (Sowerby explains it better.)

And now for our feature presentation

P1010011
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

I don't usually impulse buy, but when KnitPicks came out with their new Gloss Lace and I saw it was a wool/silk blend like my beloved Zephyr Wool-Silk, I snapped up two skeins. I even took a photo of the brand new skeins and entered it in my ravelry stash. (Since I don't have much stash, I hadn't entered anything in it before. I still don't have much stash, entered on ravelry or in real life; it all fits in one four-drawer metal-mesh cart.)

I saw that Ravelry needed a photo of this new yarn and I submitted mine, and it was chosen as one of the featured photos for the yarn.

Pretty cool to be an early adopter.

Wedding band

micahcable5
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

So...the lovely and talented and also full of self control Toni has requested I post the cable chart for my wedding band celtic cable. (Seriously--check out her amazingness as she stashbusts and doesn't-buy-stuff her way across southern Idaho. Being an Idaho native myself...well, ok, I was BORN there at least...I am proud of my sistah.)

Right now the cable chart is a Word file, so I need to do a little PDF magic and will post it ASAP.

The project has taken on added urgency, since I am developing a new and alarmingly emotional attachment to my husband. (Wait, you say. Isn't one supposed to feel that way for one's spouse? Allow me to explain.)

M and I have been together for 13 years, since I was but a lass of 19 and he a much maturer older dude of...20. We'd both ended somewhat disastrous relationships and in the course of being really good friends discovered that we were actually madly in love with each other, a fact everyone but us seemed to realize much earlier. We married just 17 months later, the summer before my senior year of college, and celebrated our tenth anniversary last summer.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, he's been having some health problems of late. Nothing urgent, nothing dangerous, just something that feels really chronic, ominously hanging on the horizon of our lives like a shadow across the sun. It's affected his energy, his patience, his spirits, and of course mine as well; the normal stress of the school year plus added responsibilities at home plus general worry equals me on the edge. Normally even-keeled, on a daily basis I am finding myself choking back tears, short-tempered with my students and my children, ducking into hallways to surreptitiously wipe my eyes, sobbing in the car. Today I burst into tears during my pre-observation meeting with my supervisor, the nicest man in the whole world. He thought I was worried about him watching me teach, which is the lowest of the worries on my ladder o' anxiety right now.

Anyway, I think I get the whole prayer shawl thing now. I've worked my way down the yoke of M's sweater and have divided for the body and sleeves. (The photo above is actually of one of the cable swatches I worked during the planning stages, not the sweater itself.) Since the body is vanilla stockinette, it's been great movie and blog-reading knitting, but I find myself just sitting and meditating--on him, on life, on what I hope and what I fear, on what I can do to be a better wife/mother/teacher/person, on how I will survive this, which is, we hope, just that shadow soon to blow away with the next wind, not the night coming early.

Sentence Fluency!

micahcable2
Originally uploaded by Wordpurler

OK. Big duh.

I realized that one of the big reasons I haven't been posting...or was getting frustrated when I DID post...is that when I type in the Blogger post window on my vintage 1998 iMac (with its little weenie processor) I get this weird bounce-back echo effect and it takes FOREVAH for my letters to appear on the screen after being typed. (Sorry, bad sentence.) And so I would often get about 1/4 of the way into a post and then just think: screw it. You can imagine the angst this has caused. I just looked back at my post manager and found that I was leaving over 33% of my posts as drafts, never finishing them.

Although Dr. Freud might make all sorts of speculations about my inability to finish off (ahem)...and other knitters might categorize me as a startitis sort of person, I really was just plain frustrated by my technology's inability to meet my needs. I literally could not post what I wanted to--the words in my head did not translate quickly or easily to the electronic page, and not just in the normal composition/editing sort of cycle. (This must be what people with learning disabilities feel like all the time. Should probably note this feeling for future reference with students.)

Then, today, I'm sitting shuffling through Ravelry and spinning through my favorite blogs and all of "the sudden" (as my students would say) I have a little mini-epiphany. Text Edit is my friend.

I can WRITE in TextEdit, then CUT, then PASTE into blogger.

Why oh why did I not realize this before? How dense am I?

Anyway, here I am, typing with fluency and a little behind-the-scenes magic and, voila! I'm a blog-o-matic. A blog-machine. A whizblogger.

I've been doing a bunch of knitting lately (insomnia having its silver lining) and here are a few of the projects in the hopper:

1. I finished charting the cable from our wedding rings, and have started a top-down raglan for my husband. {ravelry link} Dear readers, if any, do you think I should post the cable chart? I'm really proud of figuring it out on my own, with a little inspiration from Alice Starmore and The Girl From Auntie.

2. I finished the body of my Stefanie japel top-down raglan {ravelry link} and am on the arms.
It is a bit big, I fear. I'm going to finish the arms and neckband, and I reserve the right to rip back part of the bottom ribbing after I block it. Right now there's a weird sort of blousing effect between the stockinette and the ribbing, and I hope that will calm down after I block it. I had a lot of trouble getting gauge on this one--the pattern calls for size 9s and I had to go up to 10.5, but now I'm worried that my gauge ended up relaxing as I worked more on it. It's supposed to be just about my bust size and it feels really big. (No, I haven't measured it. Yes, I'm in denial.) May end up being a gift or a sweatshirt-type sweater instead, which is disappointing, because I love this pattern.

3. I've made bunches of hats lately. Been on a hat tear. Soon I will assemble them in one location and have a hat fair.

So that's the knitting of note.