Hot $h1t! I did it!

Check me out! I did it!

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, not only did I /finally/ complete my Olympic-cum-Turtle KAL sweater, but I also managed to overcome Second Sweater Syndrome and complete its companion.

Well well well, wouldja lookit that?


And how about that?


Whoa, look! There's another one!


And the reverse side!


And this is the best picture I got of both sweaters in action. It's strangely apropos - both boys heading in different directions, Henry at top speed. This is my daily challenge, just dressed up in hand-knit sweaters.



Pattern: "Prepster" from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Kid Knits
Yarn: "Candy Cane" from Sandy's Palette, purchased at Wisconsin Sheep & Wool back in 2005. No colorway names given. Roughly 8 oz went into each sweater.
Needles: US6 and US8 Denise Interchangeable Circs
Modifications: On the green sweater, absolutely none. For once in my life, I followed a pattern exactly as written. On the blue sweater, I kinda fudged up a slightly larger size, seeing as my children are giants-in-waiting. I added 4 sts to the front and back panels, as well as adding about an inch in length. I knit the sleeves as written, trusting the additional shoulder width to be sufficient to compensate for the extra sleeve length. Oh, and technically "Prepster" includes a hat, which I decided to skip.
Models: Ben in blue, Henry in green

(If you want to see the beginning saga of the green sweater, which was my official Olympic sweater, you can check it out here. The blue sweater, like most second-born children, had its infancy go virtually unnoticed. Poor thing.)


I loved working with this yarn, which I have come to believe is from the same base yarn as Scout's Twist yarns, and thus is a great worsted weight merino wool with one ply that grabs up more dye than the other plies, and thus you get a pretty cool effect from it.

If you look close, you can see on the blue sweater how those four measly sts on the front and back panels made it suddenly pool like mad. In fact, if you look really close at that picture of the back of the sweater, you can just about pick out where I made my gut check and decided I was not about to rip back the whole bit of back panel I'd completed, but would instead just start alternating balls of yarn every two rows in order to make the pooling stop.

Pics were taken at my in-laws, three days after Thanksgiving when it was a completely insane 64 degrees out. Sadly my camera batteries were low, and so I wasn't able to actually take pictures when Ben started to do goofy things like lean backward against the chilly concrete stairs, and then pause and give me this look like, "Oh yes, I'm soooo comfortable. This is completely natural. Everyone does this. Can't you imagine just how relaxed and at ease I'm feeling right now? The cold concrete wedging between my lumbar vertebrae, my head at an awkward angle just over the edge of the stair above, so if I relax my neck I'll brain myself.... Admit it, you're jealous. You wish you could feel this casual and calm in such an awkward position. If you were wearing this sweater, you would."

It would have been perfect for a Rowan spread, I swear.

Scout's Meme

So, kickin' gal Scout put up this meme today, and because I can't seem to organize myself enough to take pics of recent knitting stuff, and because I'm in a major introspective space anyway, I figure I'll go for it:

1. How and when did you learn how to knit/crochet? Who taught you?

The first time I learned to knit was when I was probably 10 or so, from my grandmother. I'd been going to Girl Scout camp and coming home doing all this wacky finger-knitting and friendship bracelet-ing and stuff, plus come to think of it, I was doing a bit of plastic canvas cross-stitch and making those potholders out of loops as well. Anyway, I knew she and my aunt both knitted, so I asked her and she showed me. She didn't show me how to cast on, instead she cast on for me and then taught me how to do the knit stitch. And I remember getting to the end of whatever I was trying to do (probably another potholder, honestly) and sort of making up a way to get it off the needles which would keep it together (which, come to find out, is actually the real cast-off), and then not knowing how to cast on so I could start something new, I wound up setting it aside and by the time I saw Grandma again I'd lost interest.

Then, in the spring of 2004, when I was on the cusp of going from "hugely pregnant" to "colossally pregnant" with the twins, Meg came up to help us dung-out the apartment and while she was here, she taught me how to knit. We sat and watched Finding Nemo and I worked on a scarf out of some Lion Cotton and she worked on a sock on dpns.

I fiddled with it on and off for a while, until I was coming to realize that I'd made it much wider than I really liked and by then the kids were born, so I didn't have much time for knitting.

That is, until the kids were a few months old and had reached this stage where they would either nap crappily in the afternoons if I put them in their crib or in bouncy chairs or whatever, or they would nap really well if I kept them on pillows on my lap on the couch. (I actually talked about this recently, come to think of it.) Most afternoons I'd just go to sleep right there with them, and Caz would come home to find me and the kids all passed out in this disheveled puppy-pile. But after a while things started to kind of come together better, and so I'd find myself sitting on the couch, unable to move, with nothing but day-time television to keep me company. (And not even cable TV - when I left work we dropped cable as too $$$ - so you know it was bad.)

I got Hip to Knit from the library, along with a few other knitting books, and some really awful yellow plastic dpns and cast on this skein of Fantasy Naturale I'd picked up at an LYS during one of Meg's visits, intending to make a hat for me. Admittedly, instead of making a hat for me I wound up making a hat so huge that it perches easily atop Caz's head without disturbing his mass of curly hair in any way. But he likes it even if it does make him look like a total stoner (heck, that might be why he likes it, for all I know), and the rest, as they say, is history.

My first really real fer realz FOs that I felt really proud of were hats I made for the kids. Here's one of them, the other was the same, but "spearmint":



2. How has this craft impacted your life? (besides financially!)

It's 'mine'. Caz and I have been together for like, 13 years now, and for a long time we were both really into role-playing games (RPGs). And then we moved and left our old gaming group behind, and while Caz has always been so very into RPGs, for me it was something that was fun to do, but I didn't feel any big ties to it. For me it was a fun thing to do while hanging out with friends. We could just as easily have watched movies and eaten pizza, and I'd have been just as happy.

For a bunch of reasons, once we moved here, when Caz was gaming with various groups trying to find a good fit, I wasn't especially interested. I played along a few times, but for me the friendships have to exist before I really feel comfortable gaming with people. And everyone was always so busy that just finding times to game was hard enough, much less finding other times to hang out and all.

So by the time I got pregnant, I'd pretty much given up on gaming almost entirely. It just wasn't my thing anymore. And that was really hard, because I couldn't find anything that was my thing, which did rather a number on my headspace for a while.

And then knitting came along, and while it took a little while before it clicked, once it did? Man oh man. It clicked hard.

Which has been great. Not only has knitting given me a chance to kind of figure out who I am again, and what's important to me in a lot of ways, but it's also been a way for me to claim various little bits of time for myself, in the midst of all this full-time parenting of twins.

And not just time. Bits of mind that are all my own too. Like, when I made up my little plan for the candy-striped hats - I think that was one of the first truly creative things I'd done in a long time, and it felt so good to remember that I was more than just a milk-making diapering machine. In a way it was a relief, to discover that I still had that in me.

So, you know, you could kinda say that knitting saved my sanity. And I'm not sure that's all that exaggerated. grin.

3. Pick at least one person to talk about who you have met through the knit-world and why you are thankful to have met them. Feel free to get all mushy.

Dude. I would so get my own wing in the Bad Friend Hall of Fame if I don't just say straight out - as much as I love reading all the fab knit-blogs out there, getting ideas, learning about the differences between yarns, learning about spinning, seeing all the gorgeous things people knit and imagine and do... ain't nobody can top Meg.

Okay, I've known her for like, 20-ish years now (oof!), so obviously we didn't meet through the knit world. But I think knitting has been really great for our friendship.

Caz and I are one of the first couples in our circles of friends to have kids, and while a lot of those friends are still around, some aren't. It's never been anything intentional or anything, we've just drifted apart from some of our old friends, because our lives are in such radically different places, because my and Caz's outlooks have changed so much. It's not like anybody slammed down a phone after saying, "Yeah well, screw you too!" and that was the end of it or anything like that. It's more just been a lot of drifting apart. And even the friendships we still have are changed. Friends we used to get together with pretty often we hardly see anymore, whereas new friends who are also parents we see more often. It's nothing intentional, but our friends without kids tend to be busier, whereas the friends with kids are busy, but at home. And it can be really nice, to take the kids someplace where we know all the priceless artifacts have been safely stowed away until college. grin.

Anyway, I think that without knitting, there's a chance Meg and I would have drifted apart some as well. And that would have sucked. A lot. For several years now we've been at the point where we email each other just about every day, and talk on the phone about once a week, and so if she and I had drifted apart, even a little, after I got sucked into the loony world of parenting... I think that would have been terrible. Just awful. Like, I'm all misty in the eyes and hot in the face just imagining it.

When I'm up a tree, Meg helps me back down. When I'm down in the dumps, Meg helps me climb out.

But it's more than that.

Those of us whose families aren't quite... there... often wind up having to patch together families of our own making. It's a bumpy process, and just when you think you've got a nice made-family sewn together, something tears and you have to go back to Square One for a bit. That's never been the case with Meg. She's my family.

Besides... she took me to RHINEBECK!!

Wrong Kind of Funky

Have been in a bit of a funk, the past week or so, hence the lack of posting.

Part of it was the elections. For all that I'm thrilled with the new direction things seem to be taking, my state voted to add an anti-gay marriage ban to our state constitution. Which managed to really ruin whatever joy I might have felt over things like "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi" which is a pretty damn cool thing indeed (Caz, on election night, could be heard shouting things like, "Speaker of the House... NAN. CY! PEL. O. SI! Choke on it, bitchez!" so rest assured, it wasn't all glum tidings in Thornyville. He did enough celebrating not just for the both of us, but for most of a city block, I think. grin).

But me? I find I'm still upset about it. I don't understand why some people are being told they have to live their lives according to someone else's ideology. When my Catholic mother decided to marry my Protestant father, there were plenty of people who disapproved. My grandparents (the Catholic ones) weren't thrilled. My mom's priest told her that her unborn child's existence (that'd be mine) would not be acknowledged by the Catholic church, unless they married in the Catholic church and raised me Catholic.

Clearly, plenty of people disapproved. My mom and dad decided to do something which ran counter to the ideology of a lot of people, and yet, they were completely within their rights to do it. Because it was their lives, and since this is the good ol' U.S. of A., we don't make people live their lives according to an ideology they don't subscribe to. Unless, apparently, those people are gay.

I think what upsets me most about this amendment passing is that the measure was on the ballot largely as a calculated move by certain folks in the Wisconsin legislature - they fought long and hard to make sure it was on the November ballot, as opposed to letting it get voted on next spring. It was meant to mobilize their base and help ensure a Republican victory during these mid-term elections. The gay marriage ban was just a side benefit, so far as I can tell.

Except something didn't work, because last Tuesday was a big win for Democrats all over Wisconsin. And yet, the gay marriage ban passed.

So a lot of the hope I felt when I saw some of those poll results coming in got dashed. It saddens me, that there are people so freaked out by homosexuality that they've got to make it doubly illegal here in Wisconsin (that's right, it already was illegal in Wisconsin, the amendment just made it more so, plus banned civil unions or any other status "substantially similar" to marriage for anyone's use). And it makes me feel, I guess, a bit lonely. Call me crazy, but I tend to think of myself as pretty normal, and this points out to me that, well, maybe I'm nothing of the sort.

(Oh, and then I got into an argument with a friend about how to proceed from here, as far as trying to break down these fraxing barriers to gay marriage, which just didn't help matters whatsoever.)

So yeah. That's why-for the lack of posting.

...... Let's move on, shall we? I'm pretty ready to leave that mood behind, I think. It is a new week, after all.

Old Business In other news, I think I screwed up the collar on my Olympic sweater. Well, not horribly, but... I think I picked up too many stitches for it. And so now I keep looking at it and poking at it and going, "Damn, should I re-do this?" I still haven't decided. I've got a week to decide.

I also have a week to do the sleeves on the Olympic sweater's companion so that I can assemble it and have it ready for the kids to wear for Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Shouldn't actually be a problem, I just need to get 'em going. Sleeves are easy. And then, hopefully with the Thanksgiving deadline looming over me, I won't take eight months to go from "completed knitted pieces" to "assembled sweater" like I did with the first one.

New Business

Of course, I need to focus on the sleeves. Which hasn't been easy, because I got in the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits, and A Cardigan for Arwen has really got me in a tizzy. I even have a yarn for it that I thought might work, so I've actually been (you may want to sit down for this) swatching. Yeah, you heard me.

So I was swatching away, and then panicked because I'd never heard of double-sided cabling before that, you know, actually looked like cables on both sides, and so I thought maybe Interweave was pulling a fast one on me. But a friend talked me out of my knitter's tree and so now I'm swatching the actual cable pattern for the sweater, and trying to plot out how I can actually make this work, since of course I'm not going to do the sweater strictly as written. I want to skip the hemmed waist, and I may want to do some short rows in the fronts to make it hang more nicely. Also I would love to make it longer, because as it reads, that sweater will end in exactly the wrong place for me. So as a preliminary step to doing all that wacky math, I made Caz measure my bust for me.

Ouch.

Just ouch.

Oh well. I'll vow to join the Y later, I've got a sweater to try to figure out how to do!

So now I'm sitting here trying to figure out if, assuming my swatching turns out all right and the yarn I've got really will work for this pattern, I can actually squeeze an extra 7" of width out of the yarn I've got (I do have several more balls of yarn than the pattern calls for) in order to make this all work.

Good thing this is all more geometry than algebra - I actually got a C in geometry. Oy!

Not Business At All

Of course, all of that would be easier if I could focus. But every so often lately I stare at the skeins of Kona Fingering Superwash that I initially picked up for Dye-O-Rama but wound up not using and thinking about all the packets upon packets of Kool-Aid I've got in the cupboard. And then I got The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook from the library again (one of these days, I'll just have to buy it) and so I keep leafing through it before bed every night and dreaming of one day getting to use dyes that aren't also beverages (though that's got to wait until the kids are a good bit older, I know it's just a matter of time) and being able to dye yarns and fiber and make all kinds of gorgeous lovely things.

And that makes me think about all the fiber I got at Rhinebeck that's just waiting to be spun, and I start to ponder what I'll do with that, assuming I wrest some viable yarn out of it, and just... argh. So much playing I want to do, so little time/space.

I know I'll get there eventually, I just want "eventually" to be, y'know, sooner. grin.

In the meantime, here's a few photos of the yarn I sent to my Dye-O-Rama swap pals this summer (I got Three Sisters Yarn, so I sent a skein for each sister):




They aren't the best pictures - it was rainy and crummy when I took them, so the overhead light in the dining room was all I had to work with, but... it's close.

One last Rhinebeck memory

So, when I was packing up my knitting on Thursday night, preparing to drive down to the The Two Sock Knitters' place, I decided to chuck in my "Socktoberfest" sock. (What? Yes, of course I joined Socktoberfest. You didn't know? Well, just because I never posted about it, never actually filled out the questionnaire, nor so much as put the button up on my blog... well, okay. Perhaps I can see the confusion.)

Anyway, I had a sock I started in October that I've been thinking of as my Socktoberfest sock, because it was an autumny kinda yarn and I had this idea that I would finish the pair by the end of the month. (Try not to hurt yourselves laughing on that one - I don't carry Blog-owners Insurance.)

So I chucked it into my bag o' knitting and went, "Huh, that looks strange somehow," but I was running way behind so I didn't really worry about it.

That night, after Meg and the Fool went to bed, I was kinda restless and edgy and weird-feeling, so I thought, "Well, I'll knit a bit of my sock. That'll help." So I sat down to knit, and realized just why my sock had seemed weird when I'd left.

Can you see it?


How about now?



And then I remembered how, earlier in the day, I'd walked out of the bathroom to discover Henry had scaled this tower of Rubbermaid tubs we have in the living room, and had been happily perched on my knitting bag, contemplating his next move (the cat tree, or the shelves?).

Apparently, that is the mark left by my spider monkey child's bony ass, when he sat on my knitting bag. sigh.

So, while at Rhinebeck, I had to hunt around for new dpns, so that I could continue working on my sock.

For a very brief nanosecond I considered upgrading to some nice bamboo ones, but I saw the flaw in that plan just about the same time Meg did. "Yeah, that way when he sits on your knitting next, he can just break 'em." Yeah, never mind.

I did find some, and transferred the sock to the new needles, so all is well on that front (finished that first sock a while ago, the second sock has kind of been languishing while I start focusing on Christmas knitting). But I can't seem to throw away those bent needles yet. They're just too random, somehow. And odd. Who knows, maybe they'll be good guilt-fodder once the kids are older. grin!

P.S. This is my little culprit. Observe his wee little black-black soul, and again, try not to hurt yourself laughing when you consider how I'm going to fare during his teen years.

So Thorny, what about the knitting?

(NOTE: This post was almost entirely written on Sept. 16. What, me procrastinate? Neveeeerrrr!!)

Yeah, I hear you. It's still happening, at a pretty nice clip - I went through a wonderful bout of the very rare Finish-itis recently, and managed to finish two pairs of socks and am making strong headway on finishing a third. And then you know what I did? I put those needles away!!

Shocking, I know. But having five six different pairs of socks on the needles at one time was a bit... what's the word, excessive. And I'm trying to stay focused on some of the holiday and holiday-themed knitting I've got ahead of me the next few months, and I need to let my adoration of socks cool off to a low simmer, rather the full boil it had been at all summer.

But what a lovely boil it's been!

First off, I finished a gorgeous pair of socks out of Koigu. Just a simple baby cable pattern done on US2 dpns. Of course, the journey to these socks was not nearly so simple. First of all, I triple-guessed myself when I cast on the first sock, and made a 68-st leg. Which was, frankly, ridiculous. But I'd actually started these socks once before, frogged, skeined the yarn and wet it down to soak out the kinks, then wound it back into a ball and was coming back at them a second time, so I just didn't have the patience to frog them again. By the time I was working the gusset I realized that these socks were just crazy-loose on me. But like I say - I was feeling much too stubborn to frog, so I decided to just extend the gusset and decrease down to fewer stitches for the foot. I wound up decreasing down to 60, and finished the rest of the sock just fine.

And this is where these socks languished for a long time, because while I'm generally not especially perfectionist-y, the idea of deliberately casting on such huge socks made no sense to me. But then I also know that I'm finicky enough about my clothes (even my socks) that having two socks that felt too different from each other would make me go buggy. Finally, because I just couldn't stand to let that gorgeous lively yarn stay in limbo, I decided to cast on 64 stitches for the other sock, and again decrease down to 60 stitches when I did the gusset. So one leg of the socks is a bit wider than the other, but the feet feel the same (basically - the ankle on the one sock is of course a little looser too), so good enough.

I wore them one night going out for margaritas with some friends, expecting the restaurant we were going to to be cold (it had been freaky cold for our last outing, we all sat shivering under the over-enthusiastic A/C trying to make like frozen margaritas had been a good idea). Of course, I was wrong, but I still loved wearing my socks. It was also a nice chance for me to experience first-hand the amazing power of wool. I'd heard people say that wool was wicking and helped regulate temperature, but I'd always been a little skeptical. Well, I am skeptical no longer. They were fantastic.



Aren't they lovely? I cast these on way back around Easter, because the bright colors just seemed very Easter-y to me. Like daffodils and brightly colored Easter eggs and bright cheerful spring-time clothes.


The second pair of socks I finished were my Embossed Leaves Lace socks from the Winter '05 Interweave Knits. I used the gorgeous merino sock yarn my Dye-O-Rama Swap pal Tara made for me (go check out her store, Blonde Chicken Boutique - it's awesome!).

I'd been itching to make the Embossed Leaves socks ever since I saw them, but hadn't yet found the "perfect" yarn. Then, when I received Tara's yarn, I knew. This was the yarn for my Embossed Leaves. So I had to wait a bit until we completed our move earlier this summer, and then weathered our way through a few other things, but then I finally sat down and cast on.

And look how perfect they are!



And here they are in action!



I absolutely loved working with this yarn - it was sproingy and soft and even the slight fuzziness which ordinarily I tend to avoid I found charming. The colors were just variegated enough to really make the socks come alive for me, and was really just a joy to knit with. Then there was the pattern - while initially I found the tubular cast on a pain in the ass, once I figured it out it was easy peasy. And I had a hard time dealing with the 18 rows of twisted stitch rib, especially on the first sock. What can I say, I have the patience of a toddler sometimes. But I love how it looks, and once I began the lace pattern? Whoo! Awesome. The lace pattern was easy to memorize (or at least figure out how it worked well enough to keep track of it easily), and it was a fun, speedy knit.

Well, until I got to the heel. Then... the pattern did this weird thing. First, there was no heel stitch. Which I wasn't keen on - I don't seem to experience any extra wear in the heels of my socks, but I really do like that bit of extra cushioning, so if I'm going to do a heel flap, then darn it - I'm going to do a heel stitch. So I consulted good ol' Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks and decided on an Eye of Partridge heel stitch. Also, the heel flap was done weirdly in the pattern. Apparently you were supposed to finish the heel turn on the wrong side, and then break the yarn, re-attach it on the other side of the turned heel, and then begin picking up stitches for the gusset. This seemed crazy to me, so again I consulted Charlene Schurch and decided to just do the heel flap as made sense to me (which is to say, I begin the heel turn on the WS, so that by the time I complete the heel turn, I'm exactly where I need to be in order to begin picking up gusset stitches - works perfectly every time). So I did and it worked fine and voila! I didn't have two extra ends to weave in on each sock. Nyah!

The other thing I did was a little bit of futzing with needle sizes. I worked the leg of the sock on my US2 Addi Turbos, which are 3.0 mm, as opposed to my Susan Bates US2 circsm, which are 2.75 mm. I was happy with this, because my ankles lean toward the chunky side (that whole swollen ankles thing did not end after my pregnancy was complete as I expected it to, a fact which irritates me to this day).

So when it came time to end the leg and begin the heel/foot, this is what I did:

I worked the heel flap and heel turn on one Susan Bates circ. Then I took a second SB circ and picked up the gusset stitches on the one side with it. Then I worked the instep on one Addi Turbo, then I used the SB circ which was still holding the heel turn stitches and used that to pick up the gusset stitches on the other side. Then I continued on, knitting one half of the "heel flap" stitches with that same circ. When I got to the midpoint of the sole of the sock, I switched to the other SB circ and pretended I was doing Magic Loop (i.e. pushed the picked-up gusset stitches to one end of the needle, making the other end "free") for those ten or so stitches until I had worked the second SB circ free. Then I "un-Magic-Looped" (i.e. pushed the gusset stitches to the end of their needle) and continued on. When I finished that needle, I had my sock on three different circs - one Addi Turbo and two Susan Bates. And that's how I worked the gusset. Once I finished the gusset decreases, I combined the stitches on the two SB circs onto one, and worked the instep stitches off the Addi Turbo onto the now-free Susan Bates circ, thus reducing myself back down to using only two circs.

Granted, that probably seems like a lot of fiddling, but I have an awful time keeping my tension even while doing gussets (they're my least-favorite part of socks, honestly), and using the three circs really helped me keep everything even.

This, of course, is not the extent of the knitting content of late, it's just what I've gotten together so far.

The Perils of Speed Dial

Yep, that's right. More peril.

Early this morning, Henry woke up and came to see us. Then he took off into the living room, and I kinda blearily stared around going, "What the crap? It's morning already? Please god no!"

And then I heard the buttons on the phone beeping away. And then I heard a dial tone and more beeping.

So I threw off the covers (and probably cussed some, though I can't recall for sure) and charged into the living room to divest Henry of the phone. He'd hung it up already (probably when he heard the cussing) but I checked the redial feature (I just luuuuurrrve my fancy-dancy phone - I can't imagine having to wait a month to get the phone bill before I found out if he'd dialed Bangalore or not) and discovered he'd dialed up my old college roommate Mary Ann.

Who, dear friend that she is, called back a couple minutes later wanting to make sure everything was all right. Thank goodness she's in Atlanta, and thus an hour ahead of us, because my clock was showing 7:45. I apologized and let her know that no, it was just Henry playing with the phone, and thanked her for calling. She laughed and wished us all a Happy Halloween and a good day, and we hung up.

I thought long and hard about calling the Gypsy Dingo Circus at that moment, wondering what kind of price I could get for my speed-dialing little hooligan, and how much yarn that might buy. But then he held up his arms and started to sing "Suuuuhhhh whaaaa beeeya da sea..." (which, for those not intimately familar with the closing credits of Finding Nemo, translate to "Somewhere beyond the sea..."), and I was struck idiotic by the cuteness and decided to let my little proto-lounge singer serenade me instead.

Though, I think he's starting to realize the effect it has on me, because he keeps wanting to slow dance with me and sing "Beyond the Sea" every time he gets into trouble. Gnnngggg!!

Trick-or-treating report and costume pics tomorrow!