Knitting across America

This country is beautiful, folks. I still believe that Vermont is the best place on earth, but I truly was enchanted by all the places we drove through. Our route ran through the Adirondacks in upstate New York, into Ontario, across the northern shores of Lake Huron, through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, across the top of Wisconsin and the middle of Minnesota, straight through the North Dakota, cutting across the southeast corner of Montana, down the spine of the Rockies through Wyoming and Utah, and then down into the deserts of Arizona. And here's what I knit (remember, my theme was to finish or re-knit long-languishing projects):

Project 1: Organic Cotton Baby Blanket
The blanket was knitted up when we left, but I'd been procrastinating on all the ends I had to sew in. Here it is, in Hanover, NH just as we started our drive. My Dartmouth readers will appreciate that Baker Tower (in the background) was chiming the alma mater as I took the photo

On the first leg of our journey, I made a matching baby cap. Here it's nestled on moss by the shores of Lake Eaton, in the Adirondacks. This was probably one of the most beautiful campsites of our whole trip. Crisp fall weather, forest trails, a secluded cove for dipping in the cool, fresh water.

I didn't get to the blanket's loose ends until a few days later, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had a rainy morning, and I stayed in the tent weaving in the ends. Here's the finished blanket by the shores of Lake Superior.

Project 2: Jaywalker Socks
These socks started out in July as experimental double-knit socks. I'd spent countless hours on it before I realized it was boring and ill-fitting. Here's that damn sock before I frogged it, on the road to the Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario (it was raining out, so no pretty pictures of scenery).

I frogged it and reknit it as a Jaywalker. Here's the first sock, in front of the red rocks of Moab. You might observe that it's a long way from Ontario to Utah. Yes, it took me very, very, unpleasantly long to finish this sock. Also, my macabre side keeps seeing the red splotches as blood splatters. So the second one may never be done.


Project 3: Peppermint Stick Cap
This cap is meant to match a scarf that I made for my sister back in February. It was knit as a small clapotis out of wool yarn (Henry's Attic Licorice Twist) that I'd dyed with cochineal. The hat started of as Interweave's top-down tweed beret, but it looked hideously busy in this marled yarn. And when I'd tried to wing it on my own, it ended up as a gigantic, round mat (diameter=1 foot -- it had been all squished onto a 12" circular, and I hadn't quite realized how huge it was). I hadn't touched it since March, and here's what was like at when I pulled it out of my knitting bag in Wisconsin.

There was no salvaging this monstrosity, so I frogged it and started it again as a simple cap. It was halfway done by the North Dakota badlands. Here's my morning knitting spot behind our campsite in Roosevelt Park. I have to say, both Isis and I were in heaven here. I was happy for the lovely, cold weather, because it meant I could don my Cambridge watchcap. Isis was happy because of all the wild animals that she could see and smell. In fact, when we drove by a bison rubbing up against a tree, she whined to get out of the car to play with it! (Fiber note: I did go back to that spot to see if it left any fur behind; it did not, but I found some later in Yellowstone.)

Anyways, I finished the hat when we were near the North Dakota-Montana border. I have to say that I loved North Dakota. I found the landscape -- the subtle roll of the land, the golden fields, the sculptural hay bales -- totally entrancing. It was so much more beautiful than I ever would have expected.


Project 4: Cabled Baby Sweater
Several years ago, I bought this lovely soft merino yarn. Twice, or maybe thrice, I started a mistake rib scarf. But it wasn't worth all the work that it takes to make a long scarf, and it had been sitting, abandoned, for at least four or five years, untouched. Here is the yarn and partially-knit scarf as they looked in Red Lodge, Montana, when I pulled them out for frogging:

I decided to use the yarn for a baby sweater, loosely based on two that I'd made last year: the child's placket sweater and the bookworm sweater. The cable from the latter is fun and impressive-looking, but I wanted to adapt it to knit in the round, with an open neck. I'd finished the lower body by the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

The sleeves and neck were finished by the time we got to Phoenix. Here it is, resting in some cacti in our back yard:

I plan to sew up the seams this weekend, and then I'll take it out to one of the mountain preserves to photograph it with a saguaro.

And that's it! With all the scenery to distract me, I guess I didn't manage to knit as much as I'd hoped I would.

But I'm back in business in Phoenix now, and I'll be getting all caught up with everything soon enough!

Loose ends

The winner of the blog contest is....
Sarah Dow! She had excellent ideas for both knitting and car games. I emailed and got them explained, and I hope she doesn't mind if I share them here:
"In the Minister's Cat you have to describe the cat using all the letters of the alphabet (i.e. The minister's cat is an angry cat). You set up a rhythm and if you fall out of rhythm or reuse an adjective then you're out. Horses, Cows, and Cemeteries is best for sideroads. You call out any horses or cows that you see to collect points (1 point for cows, 2 for horses) and if you call a cemetery it wipes out the other player's points. First person to 50 points wins."

And as for my travel knitting: I decided to come up with a theme of finishing up loose ends in my knitting basket. I have a whole bunch of projects - hats, scarves, socks, etc, and I'd like to have them all finished up by the time I get to Arizona. This is what inspired me:

It was one of those hats that I'd started, blindly following a pattern, no swatching, no common sense. Pretty fetching, wouldn't you say?

But perhaps a bit inconvenient if you want to walk and wear a hat at the same time. I unraveled it and started again. In no time at all, it looked like this:

Yarn is Debbie Bliss worsted Alpaca/Silk, needles are 5's for the ribbing and 6's for the hat.

colors!

Quick reminder: one day left to enter the blog contest! I've washed and wound the vermillion laceweight, and I can't wait to send it out to a lucky winner ...

The real point of this post, though, is COLOR

I've been dyeing up a storm, trying to finish up my dye materials before we leave (day after tomorrow now). I started off with the cochineal. It's fascinating to see the colors that, often surprisingly, come out of the pot. The darkest, most vivid color was at 12% WOF (weight of fiber) on silk/wool. In the second bath, the merino wool came out as a shocking fuschia, while the silk noil came out a dusty lavender (reminds me somehow of the early 1990's, though I can't explain why). Bulky wool exhausted the dye pot as a pale pink.

I've dyed with cochineal before, but this time I was especially conscientious about trying to extract all the pigment possible. I had previously followed Trudy Van Stralen's directions - soak the ground insects over night, then simmer once and strain. This time I followed the directions from Earthues - simmer with fresh water three times, then combine and soak over night. I did six simmers as an experiment. Here are numbers 2, 3, and so forth -- you can see that after the third bath, I was getting colored water instead of silky, dark dye liquor. Very interesting! If I'd only simmered it once, I would've missed out on a lot of dye.

Now for the yellows. I started with this very, VERY large bouquet of goldenrod.

I dyed a very large amount of wool with this, but I still got intense, almost garish yellows. The top skein is superwash sock wool. The three darker skeins are wool from the first bath. The slightly lighter, warmer skein is wool from the second bath. The nubbin in the center was silk/wool dyed with marigold, which gives a much warmer, golden color but which is hard to collect in large enough quantities.

I also tried the rest of my indigo leaves -- again, it was an unmitigated flop. The wool turned a beautiful turquoise when I first took it out of the dye bath (left), but it faded to a dull gray-blue after an hour or so (right)

and then rinsed out to an almost imperceptible light blue. The leaves, boiled, gave me only an unpleasant yellow. I think I'm going to give up on dyeing with fresh indigo leaves.

But then I closed out with a final, unexpected success!! For the last six weeks, I've been brewing an unspeakably revolting vat of orchil lichen and ammonia (following the instructions in Trudy Van Stralen's Indigo, Madder, and Marigold). It was as foul as foul can be, but it extracted a charming lavender dye. The small skein shows a sample dyed at full strength. The bulky wool and alpaca laceweight show more diluted colors - pale but very pretty.

I'd started this post out with a vow to rein in my verbiage, but that vow had to be deleted. I have one more small post coming up tomorrow or Thursday to show a bit of knitting (I swear, I've been doing that too) and to announce a prize winner. See you then!

ramblings and contest

Time has been slipping through my fingers. My mind is ablaze with the craziness of moving – we’re down to our last week in Vermont now – and I just haven’t been able to settle down enough to post. Accordingly, this post will jump around, but stay with me, because there’s a contest at the end!

The first thing I wanted to post about has to do with mountains and mountain art. Last week, Mountain Man and I celebrated our first anniversary by taking a lovely and strenuous hike up to Franconia Ridge in New Hampshire.

We arrived home from the hike, late in the evening, to find a gorgeous print of the very same ridge waiting on our coffee table. It was my mom’s anniversary gift to us, which she’d fortuitously bought without knowing that we’d be hiking there. It’s by a local artist, Matt Brown, who makes spectacular Japanese-style woodblock prints. Here’s his prints of the ridge (left) and the Lakes of the Clouds trail (right). They really capture the magic and mysticism of this landscape, and I’m so happy to be taking them to Arizona with us.




On the knitting front, I whipped off two tiny projects: a headband and a felted camera case. Both were satisfying because they were quick and used up yarn leftover bits of yarn.


For the headband, I used light worsted alpaca/wool and number 5 needles. I cast on 3 stitches, knit in I-cord for about 8 inches, increased to 5 stitches (k1, m1, k1, m1, k1), knit in garter stitch long enough to wrap from ear to ear, decreased back to 3 stitches (SSK, k1, k2tog), and knit another 8 inches. I tied a square knot at the nape of my neck.

For the double-knit camera case, I used Manos de Uruguay wool and number 6 needles. I cast on 24 stitches. For the main body, every row is just {k1, bring yarn to the front, slip 1, bring yarn to back} across. At the end of the row, turn your work, and do the same row across. It makes a cylinder, 3” wide, closed at the bottom. After 4.5” inches, I divided the work onto two needles, half for the front and half for the back. I cast off all the front stitches (plus one extra stitch on each end from the back needle), leaving me 10 stitches on the back to make a flap. I knit straight for a few rows, then decreased it sharply to a point, with a small buttonhole (K2tog, yo) somewhere in the middle. I sewed in the ends and plunged it into a sink of hot water and shampoo to felt it. And I added one button to the front.

And now the contest. I had two motivations: First, I packed up all my yarn and was truly disturbed by the mass of it all. I thought a contest would be a fun way to give some beloved but unlikely-to-be-knit-anytime-soon yarn to a good home. This soft and shockingly vermillion laceweight wool (from handpaintedyarn, aka the Malabrigo folks) will be the prize:

Second, for the content of the contest, I’m inspired by trying to plan our drive out west (probably up through Canada and down the spine of the Rockies). I’d love to hear YOUR road trip stories. How do you stay entertained on a long drive? What kind of projects do you like to bring along? Where was your favorite destination? How do you plan it – or not?! Leave a story in the comments, and I’ll pick a winner next Wednesday – September 5 – right before we move.

Not the blues I expected

This post is about indigo dyeing gone wrong. It's also about figuring out how to treat disappointments as "learning experiences," even when it's not clear at the time what you should learn. Get ready for an extensive post!

I've been carefully, lovingly tending a little pot of Japanese Indigo plants this summer. So it was with great excitement that I prepared for my indigo dyeing this weekend! Several days ahead of time, I dyed up yarn samples local yellows -- chamomile, goldenrod, marigold, rudbeckia, and sweetfern -- so that I could overdye them with indigo to get greens.

On the morning for indigo dyeing, I plucked enough leaves to fill a large mason jar, lightly packed. This came to about 40 g by weight -- not much, but it was only a small initial experiment, and I only planned to dye about 20 g of yarn.

Trying to follow the directions from Rita Buchanan's "A Dyer's Garden," I filled the mason jar with water, placed it my larger dyepot as a double boiler, and slowly brought it up to 160 F. I let it simmer at temperature for another hour and a half, and then the leaves steeped for another hour. The leftmost photo shows it while steeping - you can see that the dye liquor was a dark brown, with not so much as a hint of blue.

I strained out the leaves, added half a teaspoon of baking soda, and began to pour the liquid between two jars to oxidize the indigo pigment. Supposedly, the liquid should change color and become a dark blue. When that didn't happen, I added a bit more baking soda, and then a bit more again. The color never seemed to change. The middle picture above shows the dye liquor when I finally gave up on the pouring.


The next step was to add a reducing agent. I added about half a tablespoon of RIT dye remover, and let the jar sit in hot water (110 F) for about ten minutes. This time it did indeed change color -- not to the pale yellow that I expected, but to a light yellowy green. I added more dye remover to try to get it lighter, then let it sit for another twenty minutes. This is shown on the far right, above.

I added seven merino wool samples - six different yellows and one undyed, all previously soaked in warm water. They sat in the indigo dyebath for about half an hour, and then I started to remove them, squeeze them out, and hang them to dry. This is the first one, which was undyed. It's a light yellow coming out of the jar:

And in another minute, it had turned to a turquoise color. This photo below really doesn't show it well. I gave it half an hour to fully oxidize and turn blue, and then I thought I'd darken it with a second dip.

This is when the dyeing experiment took a turn for the worse. To my grave disappointment, the second dip removed more dye than it deposited on the yarn, leaving the yarn even lighter than the first dip. Even worse, when I gave the samples a very mild wash and vinegar dip the following day (according to Jim Liles' directions in "The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing"), almost all the remaining indigo color was removed. The lovely mossy greens reverted to putrid yellows, while the pure indigo sample has barely a hint of color left. Here's the lot, with the yellows on the right, the "greens" on the left, and the "blue" in the middle:

I can't tell you which yarn is from which dyes, because in a fit of anger, I ripped them all off the drying line and threw them away. But this is where the concept of trying to salvage the learning experiences comes in. I retrieved them, let them fully dry, and will sometime try to figure out what is what. And I went back to the books to try to figure out what the heck happened with my indigo.

I think that I found one answer in Jim Liles' extensive section on different indigo vats (note: his recipes use indigo powder rather than fresh indigo leaves). He says that if the vat is too alkaline and has excess reducing agents, then the fiber cannot adequately absorb the indigo. On subsequent dips, the already-deposited indigo will be stripped. Remember how I kept adding baking soda and dye remover when I wasn't seeing the color changes I'd expected? Seems to fit.

But it still doesn't solve the mystery of why the indigo that did adhere to the fiber was rinsed out the next day. Could there have been enough reducing agent left in the unwashed yarn, so that when I dipped it in water, it made another reducing solution?? But if there was that much left on the yarn, then why did I get any blue (i.e. oxidized indigo) at all? Furthermore, what about all the other things on Buchanan's list of what can go wrong: picking the leaves too early or too late, heating the water too slow, too fast, or too high, etc? And what was up with the strange colors of the dye liquor?

This is the problem with learning experiences: when there are so many things that could be responsible for the bad outcome, it's hard to know what to learn.

This issue has been on my mind because I'm trying to deal with another unfortunate outcome: I'm withdrawing from my PhD program. It's mostly a relief, since I've never felt happy or competent in it. But there are deep undertones of sadness and loss, too, since I walk away with nothing to show (no masters degree even) for three exhausting years of my life. So I'm trying to figure out what kind of learning experience I can salvage from it. Would love to hear any thoughts that you have about this kind of process...

For now, I'm seeing one clear upshot -- I'll probably get in a lot more knitting in the next few months!

hemp happiness

My hemp tank top got its high profile premier during blueberry picking this weekend...

Yarn: Lana Hemp, allhemp 6, "deep river" 2.5 hanks
Needles: #6 24" circular from Knitpicks
Pattern: I winged this one. I started with some sketches and vague ideas -- waist shaping, cables at the sternum, separating out to straps -- but nearly everything was knit several times until I got it right.

Despite copious swatching, I had to cast on and knit a few inches no fewer than three times -- first 148 stitches, then 132, then 124. My waist shaping was a bit off. I kept changing my mind and re-knit the center cable at least 4 times. It took me 5 tries to get the proportions right for the bust decreases. And the obscene amount of curling at the bottom (I swear, my swatch didn't show this!) meant that I had to add 5 rounds of crochet to make it lay flat. But, but! I persevered and am very pleased with the results.

The back is very simple -- I did a few inches of knitting with twisted stitches to reducing the width, stretch and roll of the fabric. The cabled straps are knit from the front and will be simply grafted to the back (they're merely pinned for now so that I can give them a final fit after they stretch). I meant to add a few rows of crochet to the back as well as to the bottom, but my crochet hook was lost between some floorboards.

Anyways, since I didn't carefully record what I did, I'm afraid I don't have many useful pattern notes to share with you. But I can make a few comments on the yarn, which truly put me on an emotional roller coaster:
First impression, in hank: I'm in love! gorgeous color and much softer than expected
During initial swatching, on bamboo needles: good lord, this stuff is a b*tch to knit with
After switching to metal and a larger gauge: hmm ... maybe it's not so bad after all
As I did the third take of the cast on: actually i'm going to scream. this yarn has a cursed drape and a weird bias.
Once I figured things out well enough: hemp happiness!

non-linearity

My mind has been very distractable of late, flitting from task to task when I need it to be productive and focused. I have no fewer than ten projects in my rotation, which means that none of them actually see progress (which is also why they don't show up on the blog). Then for days at a time, I'll go off on an obsession with my natural dyeing, covering the counters with mason jars of marigolds, sweet fern, black-eyed susans. I just barely held off a recent urge to order a drop-spindle. And let's not even get into the rest of my life!

(pause and look at some daylilies)

In the past week, I tried to exert some control over this maddening non-linearity. All my knitterly attentions were devoted to one project and one project only: my hemp tank top. With each mistake or challenge - and there have been many, since this is unforgiving yarn and I'm making up the pattern as I go - I just frogged and re-knit rather than abandoning the project for a spell.

(how about a doggie in the mid-morning sun?)

You might expect that this resulted in tremendous advances on the project. That's only partly true (I'm satisfied with my progress, although all the adjustments and re-knitting of offending portions mean that it's not finished yet). But that's okay, since clamping down on my distractibility was only partly about productivity. The other thing it's about is mental quiet. And I did find that by focusing on one project, rather than wildly rotating through a dozen of them, knitting became a calming presence instead of another source of frenetic energy.

I've never been a one-project gal before, and I hardly expect this one week to thoroughly tame my ways. But it was a good reminder of the beauty of focusing, and my brain feels nicely calmed down.

at long last

This scarf doesn't just have a story. It has a saga!!

First, the details:
Yarn: burgundy cashmere laceweight, from Nandia cashmere
Needles: bamboo, size 5 circular
Pattern: 3 repeats of feather and fan lace, with 5 stitches of garter stitch on each side, and 5 rows of garter stitch at each end.

Now, the story:
I purchased this yarn in the winter of 2002/2003, which was a very cold and lonely winter for me. I reckoned that lace would get me the most knitting hours for my money (foreshadowing here: I didn't know the half of it!), and it was a pleasure to have something so soft, ethereally light, and richly colored.

But it turned out to be a bit of a pain to knit! As a novice lace knitter, each mistake took forever to spot and fix. And the slow progress was discouraging. After about two months of slowly working on it, I frustratedly put it down.

I picked it up two years later, when I was tagging along on Mountain Man's field work in South Africa. I had a great deal of down time on that trip, sitting under a tree or on a river bank while Mountain Man and his colleagues dug soil pits and collected rock samples. The scarf seemed like a perfect small project to tuck into my daypack.

I spent many, many hours on that scarf. And yet it hardly seemed to grow and was rather mind numbing to boot. It was only half finished by the end of that trip, when I put it down for another two years.

That scarf mocked me from the knitting basket, becoming a veritable symbol of my inability to knit lace at a reasonable rate. In time, I did knit other lace things. And so it was that I felt confident enough to pick it up when I went to a conference last month.

And this time, it whizzed right by!! I finished the scarf in only a fraction of the time that it had taken me to knit the first half. I did notice one anomaly though: over time, my gauge steadily increased, such that the lace section that was 8.75 inches wide in 2003 was 10.25 inches wide in 2007. Being the nerdy graduate student that I am, I decided to track a number of other variables that could possibly explain this trend.

Could it be that I knit more tightly when I was more angst-ridden (recall, I was happily traveling in 2005 and 2007)? Do I loosen up with increasing temperature, or as I become more desperate to see the project finished? Or is it that as I became more comfortable and experienced with knitting, I didn't cling so tightly to the needles? Anyways, with only 3 data points and much interaction between variables, it's impossible to tell. But it's clear that this is a matter for serious investigation!

local color!

I'm trying to capture this place, these green hills and gardens, before I make the great move to the southwest. I've been describing the landscape in my journal. I've been searching galleries for the right painting. And I've been experimenting with local, natural dyes to take some of these colors with me.

Clockwise from right: (1) cochineal with ammonia dip (2) cochineal on silk noil with ammonia dip (3) cochineal on silk noil (4) cochineal on washed silk/wool (5) cochineal on unwashed silk/wool (6) cochineal (7) cochineal and marigolds (8) cochineal and marigolds on silk/wool (9) cochineal and marigolds on silk noil (10) chamomile (11) rhubarb leaves (12) rudbeckia flowers (13) rudbeckia flowers on silk noil (14) rudbeckia leaves (15) sweet fern (16) mullein leaves (17) St. Johnswort flowers, exhaust (18) St. Johnswort flowers, first bath (19) red wine with ammonia dip (20) red wine. Unless otherwise noted, all samples are merino wool. All are alum mordanted.

I'm by no means a purist -- you'll notice some exotic dyestuffs in here too. I'm playing with cochineal, in preparation for a silk/wool tunic for my mom. And when one local flower (marsh mallow) yielded only dullness, I replaced that dyebath with some displeasing cabernet sauvignon.

But the greatest interest for me comes from the local yellows. And in a few weeks, some of those yellows will be joined by blues and greens! I've been growing some japanese indigo by seed and am eager to try a first harvest. Some is in the garden and some is in this nice big pot, which sits on a pedestal covering our well.

(It's getting dark, too dark for a proper picture, but I thought I'd try anyways. Funny how the cat and dog always come around to investigate what I'm doing!!)

Anyways, if you're interested in more information about this dyeing, please let me know. I figure that most readers won't be interested in the fiddly details and recipes. But the cochineal, wine, and some of the local yellows (marigolds and chamomile) are readily available most anywhere and reasonably easy to dye with - and it makes for splendid experimentation!

about face

In which I reverse course on everything I said in the last post....

I'm back to the hemp. Started a plain, stockinette tank on a circular needle and decided it isn't so bad after all. Stitches are a bit labored, but not too painful, I found, if I don't try anything complicated. It's not much to look at just yet, so I decided to photograph it in front of the 'Irish Eyes' Rudbeckias. They're the most riotous things going in my garden at the moment. And look who came out to check it out!

This leads to a quick tangent on rural life --- it's been an intense day, animalwise. It's the first gorgeously sunny day after five days of thunderstorms, and all the creatures are positively bustling with energy. My pets have been hunting up a storm, trying to look tough after all those nights of shivering about the thunder. The kitty caught a bird and a chipmunk. And I found the dog walking around with a baby turkey in her mouth (I did manage to rescue the little thing, which was peeping like mad as a I walked it back into the forest but ran off at a healthy pace when I let it go!).

Anyways, back to the knitting. The reason I've returned to the hemp is that I got soured on the sock. I knit the leg, gleefully patting myself on the back for my creativity. I turned the heel on three needles, just fine. I started back on double knitting for the foot, got halfway down, thought it looked awfully wide without the full-round ribbing, and realized I couldn't try it on when the stupid thing was closed at the end on one needle. Irritated me to no end. And because I'm such a dilletante, I thought I'd start something new (hemp) rather than work out the problems with the sock.

Anyways, I should have more to show in the next few days. Mountain Man has left for two weeks of mountainous field work, so it's just the yarn and the critters to keep me company!

new things in the works

I'm experimenting with two new yarns these days. First up: hemp yarn (Lana allhemp6, "deep river") to make a cool summer top. I'd come up with a concept a few days before my conference trip, ordered the yarn from the fabulous girls at KPixie, and swatched up a storm:

My response to this yarn? Eh. Hemp -- even when sold for handknitting - makes for stiff, slow knitting. More abrasive than I'd expected. Clunky with lace, sloppy with cables (I thought the stiffness of the yarn might make the cables pop, but that was not the case).

Now, all is not lost. The color is rich and gorgeous. I'm sure the garment will soften when washed. And the texture of the yarn means that even stockinette stitch will have a little interest. But the downsides were enough to make me rethink my design ideas and put the project aside for a bit.

What I picked up, instead, was some excellent Austermann Step sock yarn that I'd won in Macoco's blog contest. The yarn is treated with aloe vera and jojoba oil, which makes for very soft sock knitting indeed (what a pleasure after that hemp!).

This timing of this yarn's arrival could not have been more perfect. After knitting Hob, which introduced me to double knitting, I was eager to experiment with trying to knit socks that way. I've tried all the usual ways of knitting socks -- double pointed needles, magic loop, two circulars -- but they all annoy me in some way. DP's are difficult to pack and travel with. Magic loop requires too much adjustment. Two circs means too many needle ends are hanging about. With double knitting, all the knitting can be back and forth on two dps.

I'll describe the technique in more depth at some point, but the basic intuition is that the stitches from each side of the sock are alternated on the needle, and with each pass you knit the stitches facing you and slip the stitches (with yarn in front) on the other side. So, for 2x2 ribbing, this looks like {knit 1, bring yarn to front, slip 2, bring yarn to back} twice and {purl 1, slip 1} twice.

It's pretty slow, but it's fun to be experimenting this way. And it's WAY easier for travelling (in my opinion) than having a tangle of DP needles. I'll keep all of you updated on the progress!

And in a last, but important, note, I want to direct you towards a new blog that a friend and fellow grad student has started: PhD Procrastinating. He's off in Belfast doing dissertation research, and the blog has a highly entertaining record of his misadventures. And maybe if enough people visit his blog from here, he'll be nice enough to bring me back some Irish lace yarn : )

knitting = hand art

The academic life is only rarely tinged with glamour. But on occasion, even a graduate student will get to jet off to a cool conference. And that's how it came to be that I had a splendid long weekend in Zurich.

In Switzerland, I found things like Swiss people:


And lambs. And garden gnomes.


And even though it was a solid work trip, I did get to wander around the city for most of Saturday. The very first thing I did was track down a gorgeous yarn store called "Hand-Art" on 10 Neumarkt in the old section of Zurich. It was visually stunning, with all the yarn organized by color, floor to ceiling, around one tidy room. I got my heart set on a ruby-hued silk/wool yarn, only to be told rather curtly (ah, cultural differences) that they didn't have any more of it. So no purchases, but it made for a pleasurable hour of browsing. And I had a fascinating conversation with another shopper there (Swiss, but working in Chicago) about the youthful, hip spirit that pervades the US knitting scene and how it has yet to blossom in most European countries.

As for my travel knitting, I dug out a long-abandoned cashmere lace scarf to work on. Although boring, it required very little space in either my bag or my brain. I made some good progress -- here's a glimpse now, and hopefully I'll have it finished and blocked within the week!

Hob II

Cue the Tarzan calls! We've got a crazy new Hob here, swinging through the marigolds!!

But it's a nice Hob too. Can be sweet and tranquil too, sitting among the flowers.

Details: I knit up this little fellow with Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran, in a deep, saturated red. It took me a while to figure out the hair -- first I was going to do some beads but was told it might choke the baby it's intended for. Next I tried some black mohair, but it looked kind of devilish! Finally I used a bit of DK merino that I'd dyed with marigolds, and it makes for a fun and colorful creature.

I also managed to finish up the body of the Tuscan terracotta sweater. I fully intend to knit up the sleeves at some point, but I might leave that until the autumn. I think I could get some wear out of it this summer with short sleeves...

third time is the charm

I wanted to create something super special with the yarn that I'd brought back from Tuscany this spring. I'd picked it for the color, to remind me of the warm hues of the roof tiles, stone walls, and painted doors. Fortuitously, it also matches the pansies that are flowering now (aw...)

The yarn is a fingering weight merino with a bouncy spin. I first envisioned a fitted tank with with a deep U neck, bordered by ribbing, to be worn with heavy white bangles and white linen trousers. The second idea was for a more bohemian tank, with no waist shaping and a square, smocked panel underneath a deep, square neck.

I swatched up all kinds of patterns on teeny needles (1's and 2's). And then my sister informed me that, by the way, you could still see through the fabric. Always good to get a reality check from non-knitters, who aren't so blinded by infatuation with the yarn and concept! My design-rich ideas were abandoned, and I started a design-as-you-go, top-down sweater on biggish needles. Mountain Man snapped a few photos of my progress last night.

I know, it's a funny photo. But I kind of liked the energy in it. And I know, it's borderline flashdancy. But knit to the hip, with 3/4 sleeves and rolled edges, I think it'll be just right.

Hello world!

Meet Hob.
I knit this fellow up this weekend, when we were on Cape Cod with Mountain Man's friends. I made it for their sweet, playful 2-year old daughter, who promptly and inexplicably named him "Hob."

The pattern is "Little Sit-sters," from The Natural Knitter. It's a clever and adaptable pattern, which I'll definitely be knitting again and again. It was a simple way to learn double knitting (a very cool technique that I'd love to experiment with for socks and sleeves). And it's an excellent use for leftover bits of yarn. For this one I used some worsted silk/wool yarn that's been in my stash for at least six or seven years and, for wild hair, Fleece Artist mohair.
I was so taken with this pattern and so gleeful about using up this yarn and so excited about the little poseable person that I'd created, that I'd say it made me happier than it made the two year old recipient. Or maybe I just don't know how two year olds show their love. Hob spent the afternoon being thrown around the house - off the bed, off the couch, down the stairs. There were plans for throwing him into the mud puddles, too, but somehow I got the message across that Hob doesn't like to swim!