Headless & Crazy

Sometimes the best shots are headless — alas. I’ve finished my Tudor Grace scarf, and I love it! The yarn is Malabrigo Sock in the Rayon Vert colorway, which is lovely. I knit all the way to the end of the skein, but in retrospect this came out a little long; I might have preferred it about six inches shorter. I guess if it really bothers me, I can always rip out the end and bind it off earlier, but that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. Here it is up close:

I blocked the scarf pretty lightly — I did pin it out with blocking wires, but I didn’t stretch it very much. I’ve seen a couple of these on Ravelry that looked overblocked to me; I like this stitch a little on the dense side. But blocking was definitely helpful; the yarn became more soft and drapey, which is nice. I’m excited to wear this piece; lace scarves are perfect for the “winter” here in southern California.

All right, here’s a shot with my head in it for good measure. I didn’t like this picture as much as the first one because my shirt looks all stretched out and weird:

Speaking of “winter,” I am doing something pretty crazypants, and here it is:

I have started to knit my Big F’ing Red Blanket, aka Jared Flood’s Girasole, at long last. I longed to knit this pattern the minute it came out (about a year ago), but it seemed like a pretty huge & serious undertaking, plus I live in one of the warmest climates the US has to offer, plus if I started it in January I was worried that I wouldn’t be done until April. So I didn’t knit it. A year later all those things are still true, but I have decided that they don’t matter because I am a crazy person. I’m knitting it in Cascade Pastaza, in color 309, “Poppy.” There’s another color called “Poppy” that’s quite a bit purpler, and tracking down 14 skeins of this Poppy was a pain in the ass, let me tell you, but I was doggedly dedicated. Pastaza is the yarn recommended by the pattern, and normally I don’t pay too much attention to that, but after a few weeks of shopping around and fondling yarn at my LYSes, I decided that Jared was right and Pastaza has the heft and durability that I’m looking for in a piece like this. But none of my LYSes had Pastaza in the right color or quantity — if I was going to spend $100 dollars on yarn and spend months knitting what I hope will be an heirloom-quality blanket, I didn’t want to compromise. I eventually found a yarn shop in Nebraska whose website let me place the order, but sure enough, a day or two later I got an email from a lady there saying that they didn’t actually have 14 skeins of  in stock, but they could order it. So I waited, and eventually it came, and it’s perfect — exactly the sort of deep red that my living room needs. So, uh, there might be nothing but this blanket on this blog for awhile as I race to finish it while it’s still chilly enough to be of use.

In other crazy knitting news, the students in my introductory humanities class this quarter are producing, directly or indirectly, not one but TWO Snowflake Dog Sweaters. This quarter the class is themed around “Making” (we’re studying drama and political propaganda, among other things) and so on the first day of class I had everyone introduce themselves by telling us about something that they made that they are proud of. I told them about making Max’s sweater, since it was (a) fresh in my mind, (b) less boring than my dissertation, and (c) less compromising than, say, telling them about stuff I did for Burning Man last year. At the end of my little speech about it I said “hey, I can actually show you pictures” and I projected my blog entry about it. A hand went up at the back of the room, and a girl said “this is really random, but I actually knit that last week.” WHAT? And lo and behold, here it is, adapted for a smaller dog. So that was crazy, but then in the following class a kid in the front row told me that he’d sent the pattern to his mom and she was making one for their family’s dog. So in conclusion, I think it’s going to be a good quarter with these kids — if nothing else, they have good taste!

Don We Now Our Dog Apparel

Max is a lucky dog. I felt like a psychic as I found myself finishing up his sweater just as the blizzard started to hit. In addition to making him a little happier about going out in the snow (which he basically hates to do now that he’s a grumpy old man), it meant that I could get totally adorable pictures for this post. Are you ready for some dog butt?

I’ve written up the pattern for this and am very happy with how it came out — it’s by far my most polished and professional-looking pattern, as well as the most complicated item I’ve ever attempted to write a pattern for. It has colorwork charts and everything, guys! Go here to download it. I encourage you to do this even if you’re one of my friends who reads this blog but doesn’t knit, just so you can be impressed with my skills.

One thing I learned during the past few days is that knitwear designing is way hard. Without a pattern in front of me, I transform into a knitting moron who forgets basic concepts like “do the ribbing with the smaller needles” and “once you have finished the ribbing, switch to the larger needles.” I eventually just had to write down the pattern for myself ahead of time, including all the subsidiary instructions like that, just to prevent myself from relapsing into moronhood.

I made the charts with the Knitting Chart Maker by Jacqui, a free program that I found by googling around and ended up liking well enough. You use it right in your browser so there’s nothing to download, and the interface is pretty intuitive. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to save my charts as jpeg files, so I ended up just taking screen shots of them.

Here’s a shot of the underside of the sweater, so you can understand the construction a little better. Basically it’s knit as a rectangle on the top, and a slightly longer trapezoid on the bottom, so that the armholes can have a little ease. All this is explained in much more detail in the pattern itself:

In fact, most of the rest of what you’ll probably want to know is in the pattern, so go forth and download it! There’s still time to make your dog a sweater for Christmas!

Here’s Max inside with the Christmas tree. Look how dapper he is with his bow tie! Clothes on dogs are the best.

‘Tis the Season to Dress Your Dog Embarassingly

Last time we met, I showed you a picture of my family’s dog and lamented that they did not want me to knit him any dog sweaters — but it turns out that the mistake I made was talking only to my male family members. I came back to New Jersey for the holidays a few days ago, and the day after I arrived, Max came home from the groomer’s with a little Christmas bowtie on. “Wouldn’t that look great with a Christmas sweater?” I asked my mother. “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Can you knit him a sweater?!” Of course I can. Why didn’t I think to ask Mom before? So with my dad and my brother shaking their heads sadly, my mom and I gleefully set off for Michael’s to buy some suitably cheap yarn (Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice, woo woo) and some needles, and I was off to the races. I’m basically making this up as I go along, and I’ll release it as a free pattern here on this blog when I’m done — provided I can figure out a way to make the chart come out non-crappily. (Anybody have any free knitting chart software recommendations?)

So that’s it above, of course — I opted for a more general “winter” theme rather than an explicitly Christmas one so that Max can continue to wear his sweater when the holidays are over. I don’t have a lot of experience with stranded colorwork; the only other thing I’ve ever made with this technique are the really basic wristwarmers from the first Stitch-N-Bitch book. I did, however, write my own chart for those — I made them for everyone in my band for the last concert of our original lineup, with the name of our band on them. Since I decided to knit this dog sweater in two pieces, it involved doing colorwork back-and-forth (whereas I’d previously only done it in the round), which was minorly scary until I realized that it’s completely easy and works exactly the way you’d expect it to. So hopefully I’ll get this done in the next couple of days, and then you can all share the Christmas joy with your own dogs if you are so inclined.

In other knitting news, the yarn for my Big Frigging Red Blanket arrived just as I was packing to leave California, so I don’t have a picture of it to show you nor was I able to cast on in time to bring any part of it with me, but I am very happy with the color and more or less okay with my decision to special-order the yarn from frigging Nebraska even though it took three weeks to arrive. I estimate I’ll have this blanket done just in time for spring. Sigh!

What I did bring with me on vacation was the purple Tudor Grace scarf, which is coming along swimmingly:

Look how much bigger it is! I’d say it’s about 2/3 done. I also cast on for yet another Anne Hanson scarf right before I left, because I figured I was likely to finish this one. It’s her Fernfrost scarf, which I’ve been meaning to knit ever since she released the pattern nearly a year ago. I’ve even had this ball of yarn earmarked for it all that time:

It’s KnitPicks Shimmer, a 70% baby alpaca / 30% silk blend, in the Sherry colorway. I threw it into an order from KnitPicks awhile ago when I realized that the extra $7 would mean free shipping on the relatively heavy yarn-scale & needles that I was buying. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of KnitPicks yarns, but this one pleasantly surprised me; it’s shinier than this picture lets on, and the dye job is pretty good — there are nice fluctuations between different shades of cranberry & raspberry. At $7  for 440 yards I’d say it’s a steal, and would recommend it to anyone — especially beginning lace knitters wary of dropping $30+ dollars on other hand-dyed lace yarns for a scarf or shawl they’re worried they might screw up.

The pattern is brilliant as usual; I can’t sing Anne’s praises enough. It’s a little on the complicated side, with lace on both sides and no rest-rows, but the pattern is pretty logical and breaks up into memorizable units. It’s got enough to keep an experienced lace-knitter interested, let’s say, but it’s not so complicated that I can’t do it in front of the TV with a glass of wine. Of course, I’m kind of a wine-and-TV-and-lace ninja, so your mileage may vary.

Socksgiving

My Rick socks are done! The pattern is from Cookie A’s Sock Innovation book, which came out last year & I highly recommend it. These were great to knit, because the stitch pattern was easily memorizable and also totally logical — you don’t need to count rows on the leg after you get the hang of it, because you can tell just by looking at your stitches what you need to do next. So it’s very easy to pick up and put down, and excellent social knitting because you don’t need to be consulting a chart or worrying about losing your place. My only complaint is that the toe is really pointy and shorter than I like; after knitting the first one and trying it on I decided to rip the toe out and knit 5 rows plain before starting it again to give my toes a little more wiggle room. (And then, of course, I copied this plan for the other sock.)

The yarn is String Theory Caper Sock, and I absolutely adore it. It’s springy, sturdy, and soft, and the dye job is phenomenal. The colorway is “Mars,” a blend of reds and pinks that unfortunately I think is no longer available. What I love about the dye job is that there’s no pooling at all; as you can sort of see in the picture above, the sock ends up looking sort of speckled on top, and stripy on the sole. In fact, as you may remember, I love this yarn so much that I bought a second skein of it in turquoise that I’ll bust out one of these days. FYI, it’s definitely on the heavy side of fingering weight — I needed my leg a little wider than the one in Cookie’s pattern, and using the heavier yarn made that happen without my having to add extra repeats of the pattern.

I’m visiting my family in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, which has been nice and relaxing. I knew I’d finish these socks early in my visit, and since I don’t have the yarn for my big red blanket yet, before I left on my trip I cleverly cast on for a Tudor Grace scarf, yet another pattern by Anne Hanson. I knit on it while watching my cousins (2 and 6 years old) all afternoon and evening on Thanksgiving; here’s my progress so far:

Isn’t this yarn gorgeous? It’s the second of the three skeins of Malabrigo Sock that I bought back in September — the first became my Damson shawl. The colorway here is Rayon Vert, which is a deep dark purple with occasional flecks of green. I bought the skein with the least green on purpose, because frankly I’m more into the purple, but the green does add some interest. I’m liking this pattern a lot; it’s just a six-row repeat with no lace patterning on the wrong-side rows, and I think the rustic texture of the lace pattern makes a nice counterpoint to the smooth prettiness of the purple yarn. I’m sure this yarn would be fabulous in some slinky, swooping, leaf-lace pattern too, but that’s not what I was looking for here.

Aaaaand since I’m at my parents’ house, I’m going to give you a totally gratuitous shot of my family’s dog, Max:

Isn’t that snaggletooth adorable? He was poking his little head into my sock photoshoot, but unfortunately my dad hadn’t figured out how my camera works in time to get a good picture of him with my socks — so I took this one a little later. He’s a cockerpoo, half cocker spaniel & half poodle. Unfortunately, my family is pretty firm that he doesn’t need any sweaters knit for him.

Genius at Work

Pat snapped this picture of me while I was typing away on my dissertation yesterday. I thought you’d be amused to see some of my knits in action — but try not to look too hard at my gross, stained mug of tea. Around my neck is my Damson shawlette, and not-quite-matching on my arms are my Orchid Lace Mitts. If there’s one thing reading knit blogs has taught me, it’s that not-quite-matching is good enough for most of us, and that one of the easiest way to spot a knitter in the wild is to keep an eye out for people whose motley assortment of knitted accessories makes them look like they either just got kicked off Project Runway or else are just harmlessly crazy.

I knit those Orchid mitts a little over a year ago, and they were my first lace project ever, which is interesting to think about given how damn much lace I’ve knitted this year. I actually intended them to be “Dissertation Mitts,” so here they are doing their job — my desk is in front of a window that I like to leave open even in the cold(ish) months of winter, but I have poor circulation and these things help my hands stay warm while I type. I knit most of my lace shawls in the spring and summer, and you may remember some of my speculation about whether and how often I would actually wear them — well, I am pleased to report that now that the weather has turned colder, I find myself reaching for them regularly.

Now that my Christmas knitting is done, I’ve gone back to those Rick socks from Cookie A’s Sock Innovation book, and I’m getting close to done:

I apologize for the crappy picture; I’ll do a proper photoshoot when they’re done. But you can see that I’m past the heel on the second sock, and I’m really happy with how they’re coming out. I expect that I’ll finish them over Thanksgiving break.

I mentioned last time that I would be regaling you with tales of the beginning of my quixotic quest to knit a big red blanket for our living room, and I had hoped that I would at least have pictures of the yarn to show you by now, but alas. I think I’m going to hold off on telling you about that quest for a little bit longer, until I have something more to show for it, but I assure you it has already been an enormous pain in the ass due to my own anxiety, obsession, and crazytude. Let us just say that at one point, FOUR different $70+ orders of yarn for this blanket were out there in the world — I thought I would comparison-shop & return the batches I didn’t like — but I managed to cancel three of them and am now MERELY waiting for the yarn I have special-ordered from a store in NEBRASKA to reach me by mail. Genius at work indeed.

Mission Accomplished

I have officially finished my Christmas knitting, and well before Thanksgiving, too! I feel like I deserve a medal. That medal might be for “Most Realistic Expectations,” though — I could never have done it this fast if I hadn’t been aiming low, making hats for my male family members (which take less than a week each) and a scarf for my mom (which took 2 or 3 weeks). This here is a Koolhaas Hat for my dad, modeled by my very patient boyfriend. It is knit from Caron Simply Soft, because my dad is allergic to wool, and I’ve found Caron to be one of the softest, least objectionable acrylic yarns around. The pattern is wildly popular on Ravelry, with over 3800 projects — in fact, it’s the most popular hat on Ravelry if you don’t count Calorimetry, which is really more of a headband. This baffled me a little at first, since it’s not an easy hat by any means — there are an awful lot of pain-in-the-butt rounds where you have to use a cable needle every four stitches — but I figure its popularity must be due to the fact that it’s one of the few truly gender-neutral patterns that is still complicated enough to be giftworthy. The problem with male hats, as I discovered this holiday season, is that they’re either too plain to make very good gifts &/or to be worth knitting at all (depending on how well you can tolerate boring knitting), or they’re trying to pass off cables as “manly,” which only really works if you’re knitting for a J Crew model. But the Koolhaas hat really can be worn by a man or a woman equally well, and its intricacy shows the kind of care we’d like our knitted gifts to show. So I figure what’s going on across the knitting world is exactly what went on in my head: “okay, so this hat will be a pain in the butt, but it will look good and since it’s a hat it will be over soon.”

How cute is this picture? My one gripe with this otherwise exceptionally well-written pattern is that it doesn’t provide a stockinette gauge measurement. The gauge is only given in the lattice pattern, which is only charted in the round, so the only real way to check your gauge is just to start knitting the hat and pray, and check your gauge once you’ve knitted the whole bottom band and once through the lattice chart — aka, once you’re like 1/4 of the way through the hat. It helps that the stitch pattern makes the hat pretty stretchy, though, so when your gauge is off and you decide “fuck it, I’m gonna keep knitting,” your hat comes out pretty okay anyway. Ask me how I know.

So yeah, in the absence of a gauge swatch, knitting this hat was a giant leap of faith. My dad has a pretty enormous head, and the pattern was only written in one size for men and one size for women (both of which have the same diameter; the only difference is depth), so I decided to go ahead and cast on an extra 8 stitches to do one extra repeat of the lattice pattern, figuring that my dad’s freakishly large head would need the accomodation. My first clue that my gauge was significantly off was when I got to the recommended measurement for the ribbing only about 80% through the recommended number of rounds for the ribbing, and when I had knit enough of the lattice pattern to check I got pretty worried. But I soldiered on, and ended up knitting the hat the number of rounds recommended for women rather than for men, because my row gauge was so much bigger than the pattern’s. And it’s come out just fine; the lattice is stretchy enough that even I can wear it with my normal-lady-sized head and it doesn’t feel too big, but it’s clearly got enough room for my dad’s head. (Pat’s head is slightly smaller than my dad’s, fyi.)

In other news, I have made two new knitting friends in the past two weeks! The first was “Fishnet,” of My Cup of Tea. She posted to a Cornell alumni board on Ravelry looking for a Cornell alum in Orange County who knits, and I raised my virtual hand. I’m probably the only other one of those in these parts, so I was happy to meet her. We went out for lunch, which was lovely, and it sounds like she’ll be coming to my knitting circle on Thursday to meet other academically-minded knitters. The other knitting friend is one who I “made” in the active sense of the word — I took my friend Katherine on a trip to Yarn Lady in Laguna Hills on Saturday to buy her very first yarn & needles. She was impressed by the friendliness of the people there and their willingness to provide help, so I’m hopeful that she’ll be joining the fold. We’ll be teaching her on Thursday, but I think I’m going to step back and have one of the knitters I taught last fall do the teaching. For one thing, I think someone closer to the beginner experience might actually be a better teacher — and for another thing, I’d like to give these new knitters the opportunity to experience the joy of teaching the craft!

Another crafty thing I’ve been up to that I keep forgetting to share with you is a beading project I did a few weeks ago. When I went to Michael’s to get supplies for my Halloween costume, I noticed that they were having a big sale on beads, and I got seduced by some pretty jasper. So I made these:

Beading is basically a tertiary hobby of mine — I’m inspired to make something maybe once or twice a year — but I’m beyond pleased with how this set came out. All of those stones are jasper; it just naturally comes in that range of greens, purples, and browns that I love so much and that matches so much of my wardrobe. And I’m also pretty pleased with my choice of spacers; I couldn’t decide between the smaller smoother ones or the larger knobbly ones, so I bought some of both and think that the combination is much better than either would have been on its own. Swoon!

Next time on Doublepointed: Some socks get resurrected, and I begin a quixotic quest to knit an enormous blanket before what passes for winter here in southern California comes to an end!

Botanic Prophecies Fulfilled

I finished my brother’s hat at least a week ago — I think it was the day after my last post — but it’s taken me awhile to get around to weaving in the ends & photographing it. The Botanic Hat is reversible, and this is the side I prefer, since the ribs offer visual interest. I’m pretty happy with how it came out! My brother is the variety of 25-year-old male who started his own company with his friends because he hated working in an office and who goes rock climbing in his spare time, so I think this hat will be right up his alley. Here’s the other side:

Overall I definitely recommend this pattern; it’s easy, and it’s cleverly designed. I didn’t have a 16″ circular needle in the right size, so I knit the whole thing on double-pointed needles, and that turned out to be a great choice. The stitch count is evenly divisible by 4, and there are ribs right at the ends of the needles which prevents laddering. Plus the crown decreases are spaced out so that they happen at the beginning and the end of your DPNs, so there’s no need to use stitch markers. Brilliant!

You may recall that last time, I showed you my sunflower sprouts and said that I was thinking about getting some more plants. Well, that prophecy has been fulfilled.  I was driving home from work on Saturday, and a little miffed about having to go to work on a Saturday in the first place (for one lousy appointment!), when I saw a sign for a plant sale at my university’s arboretum. It’s funny how putting an idea in writing can turn it into a reality — I don’t think I would have instantly decided to go to the sale if I hadn’t written that blog entry last week. I came home with these:

A Plectranthus verticillatus, and

A “Dark Dancer” Plectranthus hybrid. They’re both hardy plants and well-suited to the dry weather here, so hopefully I won’t kill them quite as quickly as I did my last batch of leafy friends. Here they’re in the little pots they came from the arboretum in, but I’ve since transplanted them into some of the large ceramic pots that my last roommate left here when she moved — you can see one of those in the background of this second picture. But I don’t have any good pictures of these plants in their new pots, and I’m scheming to get little stands for them so they’re not quite as shaded by the sides of the balcony, so I’ll show you them again when they’re in a more permanent arrangement.

Just one more Christmas present to go! Stay tuned.

Botanicals

What you are looking at is hydrangea flowers above Kawaguchiko, in the the foothills of Mt. Fuji. I took this picture in July 2003, the summer I spent living in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. All the books about Buddhism that I’d read for my religious studies classes in college said that you needed to practice meditation seriously in order to really understand what it was about, so I decided to go do that for awhile. The monks and nuns gave us western acolytes one day off a week to explore the surrounding countryside, and on one of those days my friend Naberay and I took the bus to the nearest town, which was Kawaguchiko.

I’m showing you this because I’ve just finished knitting my mother’s Christmas present, and the colors of the yarn reminded me of nothing so much as those Kawaguchiko hydrangeas. Observe:

The hydrangeas were literally everywhere. Naberay and I took a gondola to the top of a small mountain in the shadow of Mt. Fuji and hiked back down, among hundreds and hundreds of these flowers. The picture below will give you a sense of the scope, but blue predominates in this particular patch in a way that doesn’t match this scarf quite as exactly:

That’s me down there, surrounded on all sides by hydrangeas. So you can understand why they have been burned into my brain, and why this particular range of blues and purples would bring them instantly to mind.

Here’s a shot where you can see the stitch pattern of the scarf more clearly. The yarn is Malabrigo Silky Merino, a 51% silk, 49% merino wool yarn. The folks at Malabrigo call this colorway “atardecer,” which is Spanish for “dusk,” which certainly makes sense, but I’m going to call this project “Hydrangea Scarf” on Ravelry for obvious reasons. It’s a La Novia scarf — yet another pattern by Anne Hanson, whose work I cannot get enough of. The pattern is a little tricky, partially because there is patterning on both right- and wrong-side rows (so I had to remember how to read a chart backwards for the wrong side), and partially because it contains the dreaded p2tog tbl stitch — but after the first couple of times through the pattern repeat, I got the hang of it. For the first night or two I needed to do a lot of looking at the chart, which is annoying because I do all my knitting in front of the TV, but once I got used to it, this pattern just flew by. I was a little worried that the Silky Merino yarn would be too slippery to hold the shape of the pattern, but it turned out perfectly. The scarf is not even blocked in these photos, and I’m not sure that I’m going to block it at all — I think my mom will like the density that it’s got now, and she’s not really in the market for a particularly open, airy scarf anyway.

I’ve also gotten started on this hat for my brother:

It’s a reversible Botanic Hat by Stephen West, an up-and-coming designer of knitwear at least theoretically aimed at men. I say “theoretically” because not too many guys I know are eager to wear shawls, no matter how manly the color choices are. But I like this hat a lot, and I like the reverse side even more (which you’ll get to see next time), and I think it’s exactly the sort of thing my brother will like. The yarn is Malabrigo Merino Worsted, in the “marron oscuro” and “vaa” colorways.

Co-starring in this picture are Sprouty and Sprouty Jr, two baby sunflowers that I am currently trying to grow from a “grow-your-own-sunflower” kit that Pat won in a game of dominoes about three years ago. Pat is preternaturally good at dominoes; my friends and I more or less all learned the game at the same time (about three years ago), and from that very first day Pat has won about 90% of our games. Now, dominoes is not a very complicated game, and the strategy seems pretty straightforward to me, but the sheer number of his victories indicates that Pat must be operating on a strategic level far beyond my comprehension. This sunflower kit had been sitting on our kitchen table for several months, having resurfaced when Pat moved in with me in April, and finally one day last week I decided to plant the suckers. I had a streak of bad luck with plants when I first moved to southern California after having a pretty green thumb back east; I chalked it up to the dry climate and my inability to remember to water them as much as they needed, but I gave up on plants altogether back then. About three years ago I inherited a peace lily from my ex who was moving away, and I’ve managed to keep it alive since then only because it’s a very hardy and very forgiving plant. Like Holly Golightly and her cat without a name, I’ve been reluctant to name this peace lily partially because I feel like it’s just a stray that I happen to be looking after and partially because I’m afraid that if I do, it’ll up and die on me. But back east I was a big plant-namer, and I’ve already gone and named the Sprouty brothers, and watching them grow is starting to remind me of the joys of gardening, so there may soon be more green friends in my life. We’ll see.

Brown and Orange

My Damson is finished! It’s quite a fast knit, and very easy, but it got sidelined while I was working on Matthew’s scarf (which I’ll show you in a minute) and got started on my Christmas knitting. As every knitter knows, if you don’t start your Christmas knitting in October you are going to run into trouble in December. But I resurrected it this week for my knitting circle, because it was the project that lent itself most to socializing-while-knitting, and I got close enough to finishing that I shelved my Christmas knitting for a day or two in order to do the edging and block it. Here it is blocking, and kind of reminding me of the Millennium Falcon:

It fit perfectly on my Knit Picks modular blocking boards, which was handy. The forward-curving points make it very wearable; it seems like it might stay put without a pin provided one wasn’t doing anything too strenuous. Observe:

I guess I’m sort of holding it here, but you can see how nicely it curves over the shoulders. All in all I was very happy with this pattern, another gem from Ysolda. It was easy to knit, but you do need to pay attention, especially in the beginning, to make sure that your YOs line up — precisely because the pattern’s so easy, there’s a high danger of spacing out about them. I read several reports on Ravelry of people needing to start over two or three times, and I laughed smugly to myself, imagining they must be shawl-n00bs who didn’t understand the garter-stitch-tab cast-on or something, but then I messed up the damn YOs (after executing a perfect garter-stitch-tab) and had to start over twice myself. And you needn’t fear if you’ve never done the garter-stitch-tab cast-on, by the way — Ysolda provides very clear instructions! This would actually be an excellent first shawl for the lace-curious.

The yarn is Malabrigo Sock in the Arbol colorway, which I was very happy with. Which is good, because as you may remember, when I went to buy the yarn for this shawl I “accidentally” came home with three skeins of Malabrigo Sock in three different colors.

Here I am demonstrating to you how well this shawl matches my skirt, which was my devious plan all along. When I saw this skein in the store, I knew instantly that there was a place for it in my wardrobe. I was intending to make it in a brown/gold, but the brown/gold/green was better than I could have hoped for!

I also finished Matthew’s scarf last week; here it is lying seductively on my patio table:

I took this picture on a cloudy day, but the color came out fabulously. Sometimes the beating southern California sun is actually detrimental to photography, I think. This was knit in Shibui Knits Merino Worsted, which was very soft and springy. I ended up knitting this on US 9s, I believe, after swatching with 7s (which the ball band recommended), deciding the fabric was too stiff, and then starting the scarf with 8s and still feeling like it was too stiff & dense. But maybe I shouldn’t have worried, because the fabric relaxed a lot with blocking, resulting in a lovely, drapy, soft scarf. Matthew got to meet his scarf when he was in town last weekend — it was finished being knit but not finished being blocked, but we got a few pictures nonetheless:

Pat & I took him to our favorite taqueria, El Granjenal on 19th street in Costa Mesa. Above, Matthew is greeting the minorly notorious mural that decorates the side of the taqueria, and looking dapper in his scarf and jacket.

Aaand here we see why the mural is minorly notorious. The guy in the hat beckons to you, the viewer, as if to say “hey, man, check it out!”. The ladies to the left of Matthew used to be fully nude, until about a year ago when they got string bikinis — I guess somebody complained.

(Last Year’s) Christmas Knitting

I have made the objectively poor decision to knit for my family again for Christmas this year. I’m about 95% sure that they don’t read this blog — they know of its existence, but they think the whole concept of a knitting blog is a little nuts — but before I go blithely posting shots of their presents in progress, I thought I would regale you with tales of what I knit for them last year. Family, if you’re out there, please leave a comment or forever hold your peace. If I don’t hear from you in a week or so, I’m going to start spoiling surprises here.

Last year was the first year I attempted to knit gifts for my family members, despite having been knitting for about five years. Gift knitting, as many of you know, is risky business — you put zillions of hours into a project, and if it’s just a little bit outside of the recipient’s tastes, it never gets worn and you both feel kinda awkward about it. So last year I sent my family members a survey asking them what sort of knitted articles they would wear, what fibers they prefer, and what colors they like. Here’s what I made:

My brother asked for a scarf, since he’d never really had one before. We were both raised more or less scarf-free, despite the freezing east-coast winters — our family just never really owned or wore them. When I went away to college in upstate New York, though, I made friends with scarves real fast. My brother had started to hear rumors that there was a way to keep the wind from freezing your neck in the winter, though, and was interested to try one. He left the color choice up to my “artistic decision,” so I figured Noro was about as artistic as you can get. This is a Noro Striped Scarf, where 2 different Noro Silk Garden colorways are striped together. One of the colorways I chose was basically shades of gray, to avoid competition with the more colorful yarn and to stay sufficiently muted so that a heterosexual man could wear the scarf and still feel reasonably heterosexual. I think I succeeded pretty well, and he seemed to like it.

My dad asked for a hat and informed me that he was allergic to wool, so I made him this:

It’s a Catawampus Cap, but I kind of messed up the mosaic pattern — it was supposed to be more pointy. But I still think it looks fine. I knit it out of Caron Simply Soft, which is basically the only acrylic yarn I recommend — it really is soft, and not at all scratchy or plasticy like most acrylics. The hat is here modeled by Pat, who is very patient with my various knitting needs. In the background you can see my erstwhile bed, which I painted myself and referred to as my “Leafy Bower,” which is a halfassed Keats reference. When Pat moved in we needed a larger bed, so we dismantled the Leafy Bower and bought an identical unfinished bed in a larger size from Ikea and painted it together in dark blue with an array of gold stars. It’s pretty awesome, guys. In fact, I may as well show you a picture of it while we’re on the subject.

The flash makes the blue look a little brighter than it in fact is; it’s not quite so 5-year-old-boy blue, I swear. After a lot of trial and error, we decided that the technique that was going to give us the coolest stars was spraypaint & stencils, so there you go.

Anyhow — my mom never responded to my damn gift survey, so rather than make her a garment that she might not like or ever wear, I decided to make her a thing to decorate the house.

This is a Jameson doily. I decided to make it because I’d just taught myself to crochet a few months earlier and I wanted the practice, and I was excited about the wide word of crocheted doilies. (Shut up.) This is a pretty basic pattern as far as doilies go; it’s written for self-striping sock yarn, which makes the color changes random and wacky, but I decided I wanted control over the color changes so I used three different colors of Hemp for Knitting Allhemp 3. It worked pretty well; the hemp yarn softened up a fair bit upon washing and blocking, and it’s very sturdy. My mom was pleased with the doily, but she got scarf-envy when she saw the Noro scarf I knit for my brother, and she demanded one for herself. But when I questioned her about what she specifically wanted, she said “well, what if the yarn were all silk? And could it have a more interesting texture? And what if the colors were a bit more intermixed?” Sigh. So she footed the bill for some Artyarns Regal Silk (which is delightful, by the way), and I spent most of January making her this:

This is a Prismatic Scarf; I liked the way the bars break up the color pooling, but I also really liked the way the colors pooled in a zig-zag. I added a crocheted scalloped edging because it looked like it needed something.

This year, however, I have decided to throw caution to the winds and just use my family members’ previously-stated preferences to come up with some surprise gifts for them. What could possibly go wrong? Find out next time!