Knit Sisters

Many thanks to all of you who sent birthday greetings. Much appreciated!

I have to say, I never met a birthday I didn’t like, and however ignoble and even childish it may make me appear, I really, really enjoy the presents:

A selection of wonderful things, made all the more wonderful by the fact that loved ones bought them for me and wrapped them. It’s the wrapping, after all, that engenders the special birthday magic.

Here’s what I got for myself:

We just so happened to get a long-awaited shipment of Trekking at the shop on my birthday eve. I took it as a sign.

I frankly cannot get over the orange.

But this birthday, blessings truly abounded. For starters, you cannot imagine how much better everything looks when you know you don’t have colon cancer. Looks? Hell, how much better everything tastes when you know you are tumor-free! Even if you are still only able to eat broiled chicken, hard boiled eggs, bananas, and toast most of the time.

Both my father and Helen (blogless, alas!) reminded me of the Winston Churchill quote, “There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed!”

And then, completely unexpectedly, two old friends I had lost touch with found me through this blog on my birthday and thereby I experienced one of the many blessings of the internets. One of these friends, a kind, witty, and extremely intelligent man, is now living abroad (sad for me, but probably quite nice for him, given the current “leadership” we have in this country…whoops!…I forgot that this is not a political blog for a moment there), but the other, equally delightful and just as smart, is living right here in Boston. He was here all along and I didn’t know it! I haven’t seen him in fourteen years and next Saturday we’re planning to meet for lunch.

He’d better say, “You look just the same. Exactly the same!”

Honesty is not always the best policy. Personally, I value truth so highly that I like to use it sparingly and on special occasions.

Thirdly, we have more croci:

These have enjoyed a little April shower.

And fourthly, I have finished the fronts of Minnie and made a little neckline for her:

The shoulder seams were actually a three-needle bind-off. My methods of avoiding sewing are virtually limitless.

A little closer so that you can see the beads:

I was told at the bead shop that these were “special beads.” “Of course they are!” I said. “Did someone suggest that they were ordinary? Show me that scoundrel!”

There’s only one fly in my birthday ointment. Imagine my horror:

Do you see it? Yeah, the front and the back pieces don’t match up at the shoulder seam. I’m not frogging this baby, but please! I actually followed the pattern this time (with very subtle modifications to avoid side seams, yes, but otherwise…) and this is what I get?

This is not good design, people. Not good.

This is, in fact, what Alex would call “totally ghetto.” You can take the boy out of California, but you can’t take the California out of the boy. At least he doesn’t use “hella” as an intensifier in the way of his countrymen, e.g., “That movie about the Spartans and King Leonidas was hella cool.” One’s skin simply crawls.

But that shoulder join? Totally ghetto. Or maybe, just maybe, hella ugly.

I would like to note that at this hour exactly three months from today, our wedding will be over. Can I hear y’all say, “Hallelujah!”?

Because I gotta tell you, this whole wedding planning thing is really getting to me. As my friend and colleague Chitra noted, “There is absolutely no natural relationship between deciding to spend the rest of your life with someone and being an event planner.”

We did get these lovely rings, however. Just in case you are wondering, at the last minute we decided against having “Really love your peaches” engraved on the inside. I still think of it as a missed opportunity.

Chitra is right. Our wedding is all about the “less-is-more” concept, so much so that it cuts against nearly every received idea the wedding industry has tried to sell Americans, and yet somehow there still seem to be a fifty gazillion nagging, irritating, and emotionally-charged details to deal with every single day.

And ultimately, no matter how much noble breath is wasted on the idea of gender equity, when it comes to a wedding, every single one of those details is referred for adjudication to…the bride!

But here’s some bad news, folks: the bride barely knows a tea rose from a dandelion. The bride is not an etiquette expert. The bride does not have strong opinions about cake fillings. The bride is not interested in matchy-matchy bridal swag or “The Future Mrs. Wellerstein” t-shirts.

The bride is frankly just not that, well…bridal. And that is why the bride is considering erasing her identity, running away to the Greek Islands, and living out the remainder of her days under an assumed name. The bride can develop a discerning taste for retsina and Greek men, trust me.

But since that whole erase-your-identity thing is kind of a radical move, and since I was kind of having a mini wedding meltdown today, I decided instead to relieve some of the pressure by starting a new project.

You have to admit that more knitting is a better stress-relief strategy than drinking three-quarters of a bottle of Jack Daniels and heading out in the woods with a shotgun. Heavens, the last thing I’d want to do is drink three-quarters of a bottle of Jack and go out into the woods with a shotgun!

But it is on the list.

Not that Minnie has been abandoned. Far from it! She is developing into a lovely girl:

I’m quite pleased with my progress on the fronts.

I just decided to start these socks:

From this delightful new book from Interweave Press:

Cascade Fixation in pink (pink!) on size 5 needles.

These babies will be done before you can say, “Something borrowed and something blue, my *ss.”

Did anyone else break down this weekend and “prepare for glory” by enjoying a screening of 300, the exciting action film the Rolling Stone aptly observed would appeal to “guys of all sexes and ages”?

And how right they were!

I finished Minnie’s back over the weekend too. Not that the Spartans would care.

To my mind, the best scene was when the Spartans were finishing off various unfortunate Persians—felled in battle, doncha know?—while their leader, King Leonidas, munched on an apple. It is entirely unclear where he got that apple; there were no apples in the ravaged landscape! There were no apple orchards on the fields of glory!

I can only conclude that his wife, Queen Gorgo, packed him a bag lunch before he set out. He probably had a juice box in there too and a box of animal crackers, but he was too embarrassed to eat them in front of the guys.

Then there was the awful scene where Theron forces himself upon Gorgo, all the while hissing, “This will not be over quickly…and you will not enjoy it.”

Funny thing was, that sounded SO familiar. Then I remembered: that was what they told us at our graduate school orientation meeting.

Okay, they tried to dress up that last bit in a lot of flowery verbiage about how we would be enriched by graduate school just as graduate school would be enriched by us and so on and so forth. But really? This will not be over quickly. And you will not enjoy it.

Tonight we bead in hell!!!

On a lovely day during the fall of my first year, I had a chat with a South African friend from the German Literature Program who was at that time a fourth- or fifth-year graduate student. I remember this part with exquisite clarity: she said, cheerfully, “Oh, well, being in graduate school is very, very bad for your health. People gain a lot of weight, they get depressed, their skin loses its glow. Very bad. Very bad indeed!”

I was horrified. And then I proceeded to gain weight, get depressed, and develop at least one clinical skin condition related to stress. The good news, though, is that now I’m losing all that weight again because I’m so traumatized that I can barely eat anything.

The stress giveth and the stress taketh away. Blessed be the name of the stress.

I expect to finish this degree in six years total. Just for scale, the average in my department is still, I believe, eight years. I myself just have to finish sooner so that graduate school doesn’t kill me.

You think I’m joking.

Before I started I could not have known the exact parameters of why it would be so hard to go back to academic grad school in my mid-thirties. Some things I knew: that my income would be cut to a quarter of what I had earned before. That I would probably have to live with housemates after living alone for a decade. That there would be a lot of work.

What I didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, foresee was what the effect of those conditions would be over a sustained period. For instance, I failed to realize that I would be essentially unable to make any friends my own age, unless they were also graduate students, because I would no longer be able to afford the opera, the theater, the ballet, the restaurants, the wine, the lift tickets, the airfare…all the things that people my age, particularly those with careers and no children, would be buying and doing with their free time. This might have been different had I stayed in New York, where people knew me from my “previous life” and were already invested in me as a friend and would have had patience with, say, endless perambulations around Central Park (100% free!). But I was not in New York. I was in Berkeley, the Land of Milk and Organic Honey.

And as Townes van Zandt once sang, “If you want good friends, it’s gonna cost ya!”

I failed to realize that living with housemates would make me feel like I had no real home. I vastly underestimated how excruciating that “homelessness” would feel to me at this point in my life.

I failed to realize how invisible I would feel once I was no longer an authority figure in my own right, once no one particularly saw me as an expert any more. Once I had lost access to the sure-footedness and the accoutrements of true adulthood as I had known it.

Yes, I crocheted last week. But I swear it didn’t mean anything to me!

There have been stretches of the past four and a half years characterized by what I can only describe as grinding, unrelenting misery. Not unhappiness. Misery.

And yet. And yet! This weekend I finished the first draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. It’s far from perfect, of course, but I used my sources to show some things that no historian has ever showed before. I nailed some interesting arguments. Nailed them! And best of all, I can see the immense intellectual progress I’ve made from the beginning of this adventure to now. And I gotta tell you, there’s nothing so exhilarating. Absolutely nothing. Not to me anyway.

This, this moment, is why I’ve hung on like a pit-bull in a fight.

Even now, this will not be over quickly. But maybe I’ve finally gotten to the part where there will be at least a few shreds of glory. No Spartan was ever more prepared.

Although Alex has been complaining bitterly for the past two mornings about “having to get up in the middle of the night,” I am delighted by the recent spring forward. It’s light until almost 7 p.m., folks, and that just gives a girl’s spirits a boost.

Plus, I’m a morning person and a semi-closeted Calvinist and if we’re getting up at what used to be 5:30 a.m., well, I’m certain it will make us healthy, wealthy, and wise!

It is only fair to note here that in spite of my general loathing of Ben Franklin, who I consider to be one of history’s greatest hypocrites, I nonetheless never miss an opportunity to goad Alex with one of Franklin’s many moralistic, Puritanical dictums. Alex says (and he is right) that the problem with Franklin was that he felt free to opine about how others should live their lives, meanwhile putting his, ahem, dictum wherever he pleased.

Poor Richard, my *ss.

But back to the topic of more light. It fills me with a sense of well-being to be able to take Shelley on a walk in the daylight after an early dinner.

Afterwards, I am known to enjoy a heavy gnawing session.

And these feelings of well-being, however fleeting, are a very good thing indeed because while my sister, who couldn’t have deserved it more, was having a lovely time at the fiber retreat this weekend, I was knitting Minnie,

writing my dissertation, a fighting a losing battle with my guts.

By Sunday evening, having been bested by my own intestines, I decided to give up food for Lent.

You’d be amazed how much time it frees up when you basically stop eating. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

Feast yer eyes on them beads…

But all kidding aside, dear readers, I realize that this is hardly a sustainable solution to the problem of temperamental guts. And since I know some of you will express concern, I hasten to add that I am actually eating, just limited amounts of very plain things. And the less I eat, the better I feel.

In the meantime, however, I realized—thanks largely to my friend Emily, who begged me to “do the right thing”—that my resistance to being violated by Dr. F. and her little camera wasn’t futile, but it was stupid.

So I scheduled the colonoscopy, recalling that Dr. F. said it was, “no big deal.”

It’s gonna be a big deal. But there are deals and there are deals, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Gratuitous close-up of my green beads.

Here’s the thing: Dr. F., who I admire and trust implicitly, thinks that she won’t find anything alarming when she roots around in there with her little camera. She’s probably right, and her professional opinion certainly makes me feel better about all of this.

You know what they say in medicine: if you hear hoofbeats in the hall, don’t go lookin’ for zebras.

In my case, what we’re probably dealing with is horses, but you can’t know that it isn’t zebras unless you submit to the camera. Ain’t life grand?

What I haven’t yet said is that my friend Mara died of colon cancer at the age of thirty-three. It was completely untoward, so statistically improbable that it bordered on impossible, but nonetheless, there it was. Because no one, including her doctors, expected zebras, they didn’t diagnose her cancer until it had metastasized and it was too late to save her.

So am I scared? Is the Pope Catholic? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? You bet your boots.

But I think I’m going to be all right. And I know if Mara were here, she’d give me a swift, good-natured kick for ever hesitating.

The first 120 of approximately 720 beads have been painstakingly knitted into the bodice of the sweater:

Many observers have generously commented on their delightful effect…

…but no one could be more pleased with my beading than…me.

Minnie, in her full glory:

As you can see, the beads are a subtler touch when you can see the whole sweater. And there is something about Minnie, perhaps her light color, perhaps her little slubs, perhaps her spring-green beads, that gives me hope that spring will be here.

In spite of the fact that it is seven degrees here with a minus thirteen windchill.

It’s been a good week for the Ordnance and Weaponry Geek here Chez Mad Dog. First and foremost, the aircraft carrier USS JFK, which is about to be decommissioned, did us the honor of docking in Boston Harbor for the weekend and allowing civilians on board.

From a distance, she looked like this. If you will be so kind, please ignore the pole.

Unfortunately, we were not the only folks in Boston who thought it might be cool to go on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. When the above photo was taken, we were about, oh, two hours away from the boat. Not as the crow flies, of course, but in a line packed with our fellow citizens.

As we sailed through the security checkpoint, however, I noted with some satisfaction that the U.S. Navy—unlike our friends at the TSA—does not concern itself with blunt craft scissors. In fact, turns out that you can carry your knitting and all your accoutrements onto an aircraft carrier because there are soldiers with machine guns ceaselessly patrolling the dock and the ship’s decks.

If you attack these people with your blunt craft scissors and your Addi Turbos, you frankly deserve whatever you get. You are officially 2 stupid 4 words.

Ever been on the deck of one of these babies?

Skyline of Boston as backdrop.

Here’s where the planes land and are “trapped” in a miraculous maneuver that looks like threading a needle.

But with a fighter jet. And from the sky.

When they land, they go from 150 mph to 0 mph in less than 800 feet. The mind reels.

But that ain’t all. A catapult takeoff involves going from 0 to 200 mph in two seconds.

Beware of jet blast, propellers, and rotors. You betcha!

I knew a man in Berkeley who had flown fighter jets for the Navy. (That is, before he saw sense and gave it all up to become an historian of science.) He told me it involved a lot of vomiting. G-forces and so forth. For my part, I felt moderately nauseated just watching the planes take off and land on film.

There were certain restrictions about who could go on the aircraft carrier (no one under six) and what footwear was acceptable (no open-toed shoes or high heels). We were a little puzzled by all this until we got on the boat. But then…oh, ho, ho, no more mystery! In combination with all the ridges and indentations on the deck where you could easily catch said high heels and trip, here’s what you see when you step to the edge of the deck:

And you can step right to the edge of the deck, folks. Note the absence of a guard rail. And yeah, there are those absurd little nets, but if you fall over the edge…well…bon voyage, sailor!

See why three-year-olds and aircraft carriers don’t mix?

The older children seemed to enjoy the boat, however, and the many opportunities to gear up in various naval costumes:

Most fires aboard are fought by these tiny Martians.

Alex made an important phone call to his broker from the deck:

Sell!

I was windblown, but quite enjoying my brief stint in the Navy:

Time Out of Mind begged to go on the aircraft carrier and I simply didn’t have the heart to turn him down.

In other exciting news from the weaponry front, I was also accepted to give a paper at a conference in Las Vegas in a few months (yes, I know…back to Vegas!…I bet you can’t wait either! Whoo hoo!) and the pre-conference hoo-doo involves…are you ready?…a day-long tour of the Nevada Test Site.

Nuke geek heaven! Alex is incredibly jealous.

Minnie is looking good:

You can kind of see why the pattern calls this part a skirt, can’t you?

A little closer:

I’m getting fairly close to the part where I’ll start beading. Can. Not. Wait.

In other news, we’re making the slow adjustment to being a one-pet family. The shock of Zeno’s death is wearing off and we are better able to access joy than we were last week. Apropos of something else entirely, my mother reminded me of the old Roger Miller song in which he sings, You can’t drive around with a tiger in your car, but you can be happy if you put your mind to it…

We lost our tiger, but we’re trying to put our minds to being happy.

Back on Thursday. With any luck, it will involve beads…

Minnie is becoming a little more maximal:

It won’t be long before I’ll have beads. And then! Look out!

Moving on, a number of people have asked if I will write up the pattern for “Time Out of Mind.”

I have decided, in the interests of time and out of respect for Fiona Ellis—who originally combined these cables in one of her designs, doncha know?—to go about half-way on that request and give you something that is less like a pattern and more like a recipe. Be forewarned that this will require some rejiggering on your part; I’ll suggest ways to alter the pattern to make it a different size.

The existing “Time Out of Mind” was knitted to fit a 36″ bust, so the instructions will start from that foundation. To alter it, you can add or subtract stitches in between the cables or along the sides. Or you could simply add more cables. Keep in mind that it will look best if you have an odd number of cables, such that the middle cable is one of the larger, double-circle cables.

My sweater had seven cables on the back and seven on the front. It is a simple drop-shoulder shape, so the construction is very basic. I knit the body and the sleeves in the round and did a three-needle bind-off at the shoulder, so “Time” is my amazing seamless sweater. And I really, really liked it that way.

The charts come from Fiona Ellis’s Inspired Cable Knits and are part of a pattern she calls “Ripples in Time.” Out of respect for her design work and for copyright law, I will not reproduce those here. The book is lovely. You won’t regret owning it.

I started out by falling in love with the cable combination she used, then I bought a boatload of worsted weight Malabrigo in color Scarlet, one skein in color Velvet Grapes, and Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, another book you won’t regret owning.

If you want to do this from scratch, just get a yarn you like, swatch it over the pattern, get the gauge, find the sweater style you like from Ann Budd’s book, and then follow her instructions for how many stitches to cast on, etc. That’s really what I did, although it took a little extra math because my gauge on a 32″ U.S. size 7 Addi Natura circular needle was 5.7 stitches to the inch, not a neat 5 or 6.

Here’s what I did, more or less:

Cast on 228 stitches in CC (Velvet Grapes) on a U.S. size 7 32″ circular needle. Join, being careful not to twist. Place markers at the beginning of the row and after the 114th stitch to mark the front and back of the sweater.

Change to MC (Scarlet) and knit 2 rows in seed stitch.

P 1 at the beginning and end of every pattern row on both the back and the front (leaving 112 stitches over which to distribute the cables; each of the 7 cable panels is 16 stitches).

Following the charts, knit cable panels until work measures 13.5 inches. Divide the front and back for the armholes. Knit the back straight until armhole measures 9 inches. On right side, knit 19 stitches in cable pattern and place these stitches on waste yarn. Bind off 14 stitches. Knit the middle 48 stitches in cable pattern and place these on waste yarn. Bind off 14 stitches. Knit the final 19 stitches in pattern and place them on waste yarn.

Now knit the front straight in pattern until it measures 7 inches. Now I must admit that what I did for the neck shaping is somewhat sketchy, but it was more or less this: knit 33 stitches in patttern on right side of work; place the remaining stiches on waste yarn.

At neck edge, bind off 2 stitches on even rows 4 through 12, bind off 1 stitch on even rows 14 through 20. Knit even with back. Place remaining stitches (19) on waste yarn.

Knit and then place middle 48 stitches on waste yarn for front neck. Work left neck shaping to mirror right.

Using a three-needle bind off, “seam” the shoulders.

Starting at the center of the underarm, pick up 96 stitches evenly around the armhole for each sleeve on a 16″ U.S. size 7 circular needle. Place markers for center 16 stitches; these are for the one large center cable that runs down each sleeve. The other stitches are purled (reverse stockinette). Place another marker to mark the beginning of your row; this marker should be in the center of the underarm.

Working cable according to chart and the rest of the sleeve in reverse stockinette, decrease 2 stitches on either side of the marker every 6 rows, 6 times (to row 36), then decrease 2 stitches every 4 rows starting with row 40 and ending with row 112. (Change to two circulars or to double pointed needles when you have decresed to a point that this becomes necessary.) Continue in cable pattern and reverse stockinette through row 118. Knit two rows in seed stitch and bind off in CC.

Now back to the neck. Pick up 22 stitches along the bound off edge on the right side, pick up and knit the 48 front neck stitches from the waste yarn keeping the cable patttern continuous, pick up 22 stitches on the bound off edge on the left side, pick up and knit the 48 stitches at the back neck keeping the cable pattern continuous.

I worked the neck on a 24″ U.S. size 7 circ. needle. The picked up stitches were worked in a K1, P1 ribbing. Work 11 rows, continuing the cable panels and continuing the ribbing on the sides. On rows 7, 9, and 11, decrease 4 stitches total by purling 2 tog in the reverse stockinette between the cables (2 decreases in front; 2 decreases in back). At the end of row 11, you will have decreased 12 stitches total from the neck. I found that it worked best to decrease right at the edge of the cable, where it was less obvious. I also varied where I did the decreases, again so it was less obvious.

Knit 1 row in seed stitch. Bind off in CC.

Pop sweater on over your head and live your life! No seams, no blocking, no nothing! You are ready to go!

As I said, this is more a recipe than it is an exact set of instructions, but I think it can be easily varied to create a range of sizes, especially since the sweater is relatively loose-fitting and the cables tend to make it hug your body.

Good luck! May Time look good on you.

I’m not a good liar. In fact, I’m one of the unconvincing liars you’ll ever meet, so I always just default to the truth. Not because I’m morally superior to prevaricators, Lord knows, but rather because I’m excruciatingly less competent.

So here’s the truth: the atmosphere Chez Mad Dog is about as grim as it can be. We feel like Death eatin’ a cracker.

Excuse me for looking like I just lost my best friend.

Alex is, naturally, the hardest hit by Zeno’s untimely and violent demise, but none of us are exactly getting high on life this week. I certainly miss the little devil myself, but I have to say that the worst part of the last few days for me has been watching Alex suffer and being essentially powerless to ease his pain.

I haven’t experienced this particular kind of anguish since I was a kid, on occasions when I had to witness my sister suffer the disappointments and wounds of youth, situations that, as her elder sister and her self-appointed protector, I found almost unbearable. When it comes to these two people, I’d genuinely rather take the hit myself than have to sit by and see them hurt.

It is not surprising, therefore, that I have had to remind myself repeatedly to be still and allow there to be space in this house for grief. My instinct—which I know is all wrong—is to do a tap dance, buy tickets to a magic show, serve up ice cream and cake, ride around the house on a unicycle, stand on my head and spit wooden nickels…anything to distract Alex and make him feel better.

At a fundamental level, that kind of performance would only be a way to ease my own discomfort, when what Alex needs is just to be allowed to feel how he feels. Without having a clown show in his living room.

And how he feels is totally shitty, angry, shaken, and grief-stricken. Why? Because a mere 96 hours ago, he found the broken body of his cat in the street. If he didn’t feel completely awful, he’d be a monster. There’s just no way to experience this kind of loss that isn’t messy.

He’ll feel bad until he feels better. Meanwhile, I’ve buried my tap shoes in the back of the closet.

As my sister has said previously, the best thing for being sad is to learn something. What she didn’t say is that the second best thing for being sad is to buy another ball of Trekking:

I shall design a sock using this yarn and call it “Zeno.”

The third best thing for being sad is to start a summer sweater. I’m making Minnie from Rowan 39:

I foresee that this will be a good sweater for various auxiliary wedding events this summer.

I’m using Classic Silk in color 6916, Natural, which is knitting up like so:

Lovely, wouldn’t you say?

Working with Classic Silk is a wonderful experience. As a process knitter, I give it my most enthusiastic endorsement.

Back with more, and I hope greater cheer, on Friday…