Knitting A Mile Square

Of all the knitting holidays, Oscar Night is probably the most holy.

Before we go on, some of you – at least one of you – may not be up on all the knitting holidays.  It’s  a short year, with so far only three major holidays, but I am sure I will be adding more.

The year starts out at the beginning of October with the Lenten like  period of yarn purchase denial that ends with the weekend long Sheep and Wool Festival at Rhinebeck.   In November and December, we celebrate the new season of Victorian/Edwardian mini series on PBS with lots of knit alongs which are like prayer services with cursing, and wine.  There is the Veneration of the Blessed Noro that takes place at the Knitting Nation winter sale sometime in February;  then, finally, the Oscar night, tonite!

It’s remarkable that I haven’t seen even one of the movies that are up for nomination. But, I am going to a friend’s house to watch the Oscars, and we are going to play this excellent little Bingo game.

I’ve got four projects on the needles and I am hoping to get a substantial amount of two of them done  tonight. One is Elsewhere by Amy Swenson; I am on sleeve two, using a devil-may-care combo of Malabrigo and Noro.

The other is a slouchy beret based on the Snail Hat. I believe my innovations with this pattern will win me one of those Special Effects Oscars at next year’s ceremony.

It is a universal knitting truth that a regular person can wear nothing made from Ozark Mountain Hand Spun.  (I said a regular person, not you).

I tried to go to work today, even though it was Snowmaggedeon. Again.  There were no buses running in Hoboken, and the PATH is a 10 block walk, and even if I got out of town there is still the matter of two rivers to cross to get to work, where the one remaining place I could get coffee in our remote industrial neighborhood was closed by the Board of Health for not having a working bathroom for staff for over a year.

I had a big ball of Ozark Mountain of the browny-green variety in the yarn-lined fallout shelter that I bought at Downtown Yarns a few years ago.  Downtown Yarns is another one of those places that has good stock in great colors, where I buy one or two skeins of great colored stuff that lingers in the stash for a really long time because they are generally unusable.

After taking a quick turn around the house with my favorite household appliance I settled in with Hattitude, for which I had tramped to the library several blocks out of my way in last night’s frozen fog.  A few pages in I developed a pretty bad hattitude myself; this designer usually has a lot more interesting knitting ideas than you will find in this book.  Some of them are quite horrible, and most of them are boring.

However, she also seems to have a lot of leftover Ozark Mountain Handspun in her stash as evidenced from this book, so loaded up Camille on the tube and cast on Down To Earth from the book, using some leftover Lambspun Pride Bulky for the hat and OMH for the brim.

Emily calls the results “Wood Land Animal”:

Come Hither Little Faun!

No, don’t say you “kind of like it”.  It looks worse up close; I only used a size 11 needle for the brim to make it tight, and the brown yarn locks give look a lot like human hair knitted in there.  Plus OMH usually has some straw in the skein because of the underprocessing, and that adds the nice rustic touch.  Like you passed out in a field wearing this hat.

Well, yes, it was a good project for a snowy day.

Yes, there has been a lot of intensive knitting going on these past few weeks.  Just no pictures of knitting and nothing finished.  I’m deep in the middle of cables, lace, seed stitch and spit splicing ends and hopefully all will soon be revealed.  Or finished. Or just hidden away in the closet.  February is a tough knitting month.  So much yarn is on sale during this time of year, it’s hard to take the time away from shopping for yarn at stores and online to actually knit.

We took a trip to Boston and surrounding environs this weekend to look at some colleges with Emily.  This was emotionally exhausting, mostly because  when Emily goes to college, I will have to divert all that laundry money  from yarn to tuition.  While there were no yarn stores anywhere I looked in Boston,  there was a lot of Shepard Fairey everywhere.

Art is Watching You

On Thursday night we ate pizza at a good  place in the North End with a long line outside and red wine served in  big water glasses.  While I was waiting on that long line a handsome man chatted me up and invited me to dinner, too, but I already had a date, not to mention a husband and a child standing next to me so I had to pass.

Still, don’t you like to be asked?

Here’s Emily waiting on line.  Even though it’ll be about a year before she leaves, it’s breaking my heart to think about the whole thing.

Profile in Neon

I did have the chance to go to this famous place before we headed home.  They were having a sale too.

Unintentional Punk Rock Yarn Store

When I walked in there, the Gang of Four album Entertainment! was playing really, really loud and I though Wow, this is one rockin’ yarn store.  There wasn’t anything I wanted to buy there even 20% off, but I stayed for a few songs since that is for sure one of the ten albums I’d bring to a desert island, a desert island that had a turntable and electricity. When I complemented the salesclerk (a gray haired contemporary working on two socks at time, toe up, magic loop) on her excellent knitting and DJ skills, she gave me a cold stare and reported that the music was coming from the record store in the basement and that she was more of a Michael Buble person herself.

I’m the primary laundress in this house.  On good days, I don’t mind it – I like to fold clothes but I get bored when it comes to putting them away. I like to match socks.  I also go through pockets and remove all the stuff – pens, guitar picks, those little flash drives and money, put it in nice piles and return it to the laundered.

But no more. Oh, I’ll still give back the scrunchies and the mechanical pencils, but I’m keeping the cash, and converting it into yarn.  I’m keeping a tally there on the right hand side of this blog.

Already though I am in the hole on this deal.  Each year I eagerly await Knitting Nation’s very excellent winter sale, and it is this weekend.  Are you with me, knitting sisters? I’m going to take an advance on the laundry money.  Certainly I will be able to make up the difference over a few weeks by throwing in an extra load or two a week.  I get yarn, you get clean pants.

Everybody wins.

A whole week into the New Year and for the first time ever, I have kept a resolution past January 2nd.  Not only have I cast on 4 new projects, and spent cold hard plastic in a yarn store,  I’ve already ripped out two projects due to serious gauge derailments.  There is way to much to be done this year to waste time on funky gauge!

I kept a giant, Christo like wrap and a Debbie Bliss sweater with crazy cables and bobbles, both selected for the serious amount of repetitive knitting that is best accomplished at the start of a new TV season.  If course, there are no pictures yet but I did wear the half finished wrap today out in the cold.  Another big step in 2010: who says it has to be finished before you wear it?

This week brings the return of Project Runway, and I hope at last they’ve seriously considered adding a few knitting challenges to their lineup.  The last season was so dull, an hour or so of watching someone knit, say, stockinette would only liven it up. I’ve decided to cast on some hip and happenin’ fingerless mitts to work on during PR, either these or these.   (Sorry for the Rav links – what, you still haven’t joined Ravelry? You don’t need to be a knitter, go ahead, be the guest).  I’ll also be pretending not to watch Big Love, even though I couldn’t find any patterns for Mormon ritual undergarments on Ravelry.

Today, though, brought the premiere of the anticipated-since-I -learned-about-it-yesterday “Return to Cranford”.  I loved           the  original Cranford, and I’ve read the book many times. In fact, you can read it right now if you’ve got a few days. From what I  c an tell, some of the original story remains.There’s an odd bit of casting with Tim Curry playing one of the characters. Do you think he invites Miss Matty Jenkins up to the lab to see what’s on the slab?

I taped it to watch later, but the thought of a new Cranford series makes me shiver with antici-

Most of the last quarter of 2009 was occupied by imagining and executing a vest that maybe Don Draper would wear on a nice fall Saturday. Something like this:

It was a gift for Brendan for his birthday, and it was a miracle of double blocking and seaming. You can see the front right panel here, but I don’t have a picture of the actual vest itself as of yet.

If I did, I would call your attention to to the almost invisible  seams and excellently placed armhole facing, but I would get an 8 year old to mix me another Manhattan while I bemoaned the inexpert buttonhole situation that could not be remedied.

News Update: here’s the guy, here’s the vest. It looks to me like this picture was definitely taken on a Saturday afternoon.

Inspired by my knitty neighbor Mrs. H, (and even though I am in the middle of serious fall knitting madness) I foolishly believed I had an evening to spare to quickly whip up the very popular Star Crossed Beret for Emily.  I thought: look! It’s size 11 needles, bulky yarn, some sassy little cables, I could do this with my eyes closed and one needle tied behind my back.

Well, readers, let me give you some advice:  RTFP*.  This hat was frogged and reknitted 3 times in three days, ripped out right down to the ribbing.  First – and one word describes it all: gauge.  Second, I misread the cable pattern, making twice as many cables as called for, because I’m so cocky I just look at the pictures not the instructions.  And lastly, I misjudged Emily’s direction to make it “slouchy, but not too slouchy, just slouchy enough”.  What’s the median circumference of slouchy, can you tell me?

Luckily I finished it in time for the snow on Saturday.

In the end, it was only middling slouchy but I needed to get on with my knitting life!

* Read The F$%#%& Pattern