Bird and Little Bird

Yarn Along (A Sock and a Half).

I have been a painfully intermittent knitter of late. Which is not to say that I have been knitting much, because I actually have, but in fits and starts that lead to things like forgetting where I am in a decrease row, neccesitating painfully slow fixes if I am to continue on. I suspect maybe some of you know how this goes?

 

I seem to be settling into my realization that I should really just stick to socks and mittens for the next little while. Or maybe little sweaters for little people. I'm still a bit discouraged by the fact that I spent so much time knitting my Tea Leaves only to have it be way too big. I guess it is all a lesson in being a process oriented (as opposed to product oriented) maker of things?This is something I could use some work on, I suppose, so I'll try my best to embrace the learning, however marginally painful it may be.

2014 is officially the year of knitting the small stuff.

 

Yarning along with Ginny today.

The Right Sleeve?

Well, I can finally say that my Tea Leaves has one finished sleeve. There were some hiccups here, primarily related to misreading the pattern and subsequently knitting the sleeve cuff in reverse stockinette, instead of garter. Oh, and that bit where I ran out of yarn on the bind off row. There was also that. I guess I am an optimist at heart, eh? I really thought I could make it.

Of course, once you have a finished sleeve, one always feels like it would be nice to try the sweater on and start visualizing what it will be like when it is finally finished. So I did this. And, for better or worse, I started this thing when I was about a year post-baby Z. Baby Z. is now toddler Z. and between the benefits of time and running about 20 miles a week... Yep. I think that the sweater might be too big.

What is it that Elizabeth Zimmermann said about mittens? Yeah. That. I think I need to go back to mittens.

Yarn Along (Ribbit).

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is just what I get for feeling all smug about my ability to joyfully knit away with skinny yarn on tiny needles. Yep. I am referring to the realization that I only thought that I had gotten the right gauge with the size two needles I was using for my handwarmers. In fact, I was off. Consistently off over many, many rows of striping. By the time that I had knit six or so inches of handwarmer, I realized that they were quickly beginning to look like something that would fit a person with much larger and more industrious hands. Like maybe a giant carpenter or something.

(If you are thinking, at this moment, that the knitting for giants problem has come up here in the past, then you are both correct and in possession of a stellar memory!)

Indeed, this business of not realizing just how many needle sizes I need to come down to accomodate my tight and tiny stitch habit seems to come back to bite me repeatedly. And yet, I never seem to learn my lesson. That fact alone is some sort of mini-marvel.

 

So, with much frogging and digging around for size one needles now under my belt, I'm going to see about knitting some handwarmers.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (On Smaller Needles).

Despite my very best intentions, my wicked case of knitting ADD has struck again. Half way through the sleeves on my Tea Leaves cardi, I suddenly find myself knitting a pair of fingerless gloves. Funny how that happens. Like, every time. But, I tell myself, we have been taking a lot of short road trips to various places along the Eastern Seaboard these last couple of weeks, and no one wants to sit on a sandy beach with a mostly finished sweater draped across their lap. So, a tiny project is just the thing.

And, I realize, that tiny projects really are my favorite. I actually like to knit adult sized socks out of fingering weight yarn suspended on super tiny needles. I also like to knit many mittens, one after another. Cuffs, thumb gussets and all. I feel that this bit of personal insight is likely to serve me well. It is, afterall, considerably less expensive to knit a pair of mittens than it is an adult sized sweater. So maybe after these fingerless gloves and Z.'s sweater (and yes, finishing my Tea Leaves- pinky swear), I will knit mittens for the world.

 

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (Twitchy Needles).

It seems that there is a way to be able to predict the arrival of autumn that has nothing to do with calendar pages or even the beginning of the new school year. Indeed, I can tell that fall is imminent when I start getting twitchy about all the things that I must knit right now. This feeling usually comes out of nowhere, and generally arrives at the tail end of a summer spent being totally unmotivated to sit with an almost finished adult sized wool sweater spread across my lap in 85 degree heat.

 

I had a Quince & Co. gift certificate hanging out in my inbox from my birthday last year, and last week finally felt the need to put it to use. I had been saving it to buy yarn for a sweater for Z., but didn't want to end up knitting an 18 month size garmet only for him to outgrow it overnight. But he is pretty much enormous now, and can easily rock a 2T, so I decided it was time to go for it, and ordered enough yarn to knit a size 4. The yarn arrived the end of last week, and is hanging out in an old sap bucket, looking pretty and perfect and trying very hard to tempt me away from finishing my Tea Leaves. Which, after having to rip out the sleeve I almost had finished night before last, wouldn't take much. Just saying. The siren song of brand new yarn is a force to be reckoned with.

 

Of course Mr. Shark Pajamas here has also discovered the soft and squishy bundles of yarn, and they have now had to be placed on a shelf just out of his reach. I can only watch him attempt to feed them to the dog so many times, people.

Yarning Along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (Sleeve Stitches and Puzzle Pieces).

After weeks and weeks of idle threats, I finally got over my warm weather knitting aversion long enough to pick up the stitches on the underarm of my Tea Leaves and start in on the knitting of sleeves. I really need to make myself some kind of highly visible signage to remind me that sleeves are very satisfying to knit up (or down, as the case may be) once you actually start, so that I will do less of this nonsense where I put them off for many, many days at a time. I think that my hesitation is often related to the previously discussed frustration with the number of stitches a pattern will tell you to pick up when starting a sleeve. This pattern suggested eleven. Eleven! I picked up seventeen.

In other news, our dining room table is mostly covered with puzzle pieces pretty much always these days. After years of trying to get the big kid to attempt more involved and intricate puzzles, she finally went all in on the idea. The new favorite summer activity is listening to the Mysterious Benedict Society series on audio while drinking lemonade and doing puzzles. Written out like this, it doesn't sound super exciting. But I don't know... I feel like the girl knows how to have a pretty good time.

Yarning along with the kind and lovely Ms. Ginny today.

Yarn Along (From These Needles to Those Ones.)

At long, long last, I have finally done the bind-off on the bottom edge of my Tea Leaves cardigan. My progress has been ridiculously slow, even for me. But honestly, I cannot possibly overstate the amount of time I am spending these days discussing the problem of whether or not to honor the pigeon's request to drive the bus. The fact that I have mentioned this issue in both of the posts that I have written this week should be illuminating. Talking about the pigeon and his lofty bus driving aspirations is what I do these days, folks. With some laundry folding and trips to the town pool thrown in for good measure, of course. All of this is resulting in a somewhat drastic reduction in productive knitting time.

 

"Should we let the pigeon drive the bus, Zak?"

"No. Uh-uh. No."

The other favorite read these days is Hondo and Fabian by Peter McCarty, which honestly, I kind of want someone to read to me one hundred times a day, too. So no complaints there.

 

So, next up is the picking up of underarm stitches and the knitting away at sleeves. The trick here, however, is the fact that it has been long enough since I worked on the sweater using the larger size needle called for in the pattern that I now can't remember what size it was that I was using. I just know that I needed to change needle size from the recommended one to get gauge. Hmn.

So therein, folks, lies your public service announcement for today: when knitting slowly while taking frequent breaks to talk with a toddler about common birds and their role in our nation's public transporation system, please remember to take notes.

You'll thank me later.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (Picking it Up).

I should begin by saying a thank you to everyone who left encouraging commentary last week on the idea of redoing the bind-off on my crewneck sweater. Weirdly enough, the box containing that sweater hasn't surfaced in the unpacking process just yet, but when it does, I think I will indeed summon my courage and fix it right up. Or at least try.

In the meantime, I continue to work along the bottom edge of my Tea Leaves at a preternaturally slow pace. I'm close, actually, to binding off the bottom of this sweater as well, but I keep making the mistake of doing late evening knitting. After a full day of dog chasing and baby wrangling and house organizing, late evening knitting is the ultimate recipe for disaster. So, my biggest accomplishment for this week thus far? Learning how to pick up dropped stitches in garter.

In my defense, I must say that I have not historically been a stitch dropper. But something about the hem of this project has been causing me to drop stitches like crazy and then not realize it for eight or so rows. I had tried on a couple of previous stitch dropping occasions to dutifully pick up my dropped stitches, but really struggled with the garter, and kept making things so much worse that it ended up being better to frog back to the end of the body section of the sweater. But then, yesterday morning, I finally figured it out. The process is a little persnickety, and I wouldn't suggest doing it for row and rows and rows exactly, but it is definitely better than frogging a dozen rows of sweater width stitching. Goodness.

So, I may not have figured out where to keep anyone's shoes, or managed to unpack any of the boxes piled up in Mariam's room. But I did get something done. That is the official party line anyway.

Yarning along with Ginny today.  Oh, and speaking of Ginny, check out her post from yesterday to download a free project PDF from the latest issue of Alphabet Glue, and to find a coupon code good for 20% off all this week. Good stuff for summer!

Yarn Along (Hidden Not-So Treasure).

One of the seemingly inevitable "gifts" of the moving process is the discovery of things long forgotten, often purposely, and for fairly good reasons. This sweater, for example. It is an Oatmeal Pullover, knit from cream colored O-Wool and it had been stashed inside a canvas tote bag on the top shelf of my closet for approximately two and a half years, completely finished with the notable exception of half a sleeve that would probably prove useful if a person ever wanted to actually wear said sweater.

So why abandon a very nearly finished and objectively kind of attractive sweater to the lonely, dark cavern of my closet after hours and hours of knitting it? Well. The thing is that this particular pattern called for using a sewn bind-off, and due to it either being a strange technique or to the possibility of user error (ahem) the end result is the worst bind-off ever. I can't even bring myself to look at it. So, the closet. Inside a bag to further decrease the possibility of catching a glimpse of it. I would be brave and show you a photo of the sweater's hem, except that we are still only about 80% unpacked and I can't actually find the sweater right now. But I know that I will soon, and then I'll need to decide what to do with it. Closet space being limited here, I'm thinking that I will probably need to just get brave and fix it. But I haven't ever undone a bind-off, and I'm wondering how that even works. Anyone? If you have words of wisdom, I am all ears.

And half-finished sleeves, of course.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (Humming the Jaws Theme Song).

I was feeling a bit optimistic earlier this week as I finally worked away at the hem of my Tea Leaves cardigan. Garter stitch is actually my idea of a good time, and I figured that by today, I would have it bound off and would be telling you all about how I was at l0ng last picking up sleeve stitches. But then late last evening, when clearly I should have been sleeping and not knitting, I made an unfortunate discovery: dropped stitches many rows back. And then I made an even more unfortunate discovery: I am good at many things, but picking up stitches in garter is not one of them. Despite my very best attempts to follow internet instructions dutifully, it was not to be. After spending more time trying to pick up those stupid stitches than I probably had spent knitting the rows that came after them, I took a deep sigh and just frogged away. All the way back to the beginning of the garter stitch rows. So there.

 

But honestly, we have had a week of it thus far, so my knitting woes are minor in the scheme of things. It has been the sort of week where by Monday evening I found myself humming the Jaws theme song while brushing my teeth and saying to myself "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..." I only do that when things are a special kind of crazy and I find myself caught off guard by it all.

 

Which is exactly how I felt when we landed in the emergency room Monday morning with the baby in anaphylactic shock after eating a bit of peanut butter. Yep. We are adding foods to our list of forbiddens right and left. Apparently, I am raising children with immune systems that just don't know when to quit. So that is something. But I guess that life is a collection of surprises of all sorts, yes? Peanut allergies are one example, I suppose. But then there are nicer things to come along with them. Like these tulips that showed up on my doorstep yesterday morning, sent from Dawn because she is thoughtful and sweet and rightfully concerned that I am losing my mind.

And that is the kind of surprise that keeps things in balance. This much I know.

Yarning along with Ginny today.