Knit Sisters

Today we had

Snow, that is, not a new, well-kept backyard. Sadly.

So I had to put

Obviously Shelley mistook her paw wax for a snack at some point, which admittedly is better than mistaking, say, a chair for a snack. Which is not unknown among her canine brethren.

on these.

Forming an “invisible boot,” you see.

Like most grooming or canine-improvement strategies of mine, this one was met with barely disguised impatience and disdain from the dog herself.

Keep it up, and one day I will eat a chair. Your favorite chair.

But it was good knitting weather.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation grant proposal “process” is kicking my butt from here to Novosibirsk. But stay tuned! I’ll give you the full report on life, grant applications, and what it’s like to have your arse relentlessly kicked…that is, when this infernal process is over.

Wasn’t it Richard Russo who so eloquently remarked that getting a Ph.D. and surviving the tenure process was like, “being the winner of a shit-eating contest”? Something to ponder, something to ponder…

As Lorinda has noted, Time is on my side:

And soon, I hope, on my back.

Time, it must be said, flies when you are having fun.

Meanwhile, in the spendthrift-and-gluttony sector of my existence, I was working at the shop this afternoon and without meaning to at all, I somehow ended up with a couple of skeins of this sumptuous stuff:

Claudia’s Hand Painted lace-weight silk in colorway chocolate cherry.

Yes, I realize that the colors are astoundingly similar to those I’m using for Time, but I believe that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. I draw guidance from the old adage, “You can never be too thin or too rich or have too much yarn in various shades of red and pink.”

Or as one of my favorite customers—a woman who is not only utterly delightful, but who also has a yarn habit that…well, let’s just say she’s what we’d call as “heavy user” if we were dealing drugs…or for that matter if we were McDonald’s—has been known to say, “My life’s goal is to convert all my money into yarn and die bankrupt and heavily insulated.”

Hear, hear!

Time out of mind is a growing boy (dog is included for scale):

Hey, this smells vaguely like…sheep…

A more sober photograph:

Still life with Time, wine glasses, and the golden egg. The allegorical significance of all this is completely obscure.

I’m a mere 3.5 inches away from separating it into front and back for the sleeves. Which is a damn good thing too because in spite of the bright sunshine, the temperature here has suddenly become miserably cold. I think we’re all especially miserable because the remarkable and unseasonable run of warm weather we’ve had up to now makes it seem even more cold. And unjust. And possibly life-threatening!

I hereby take back every ill-considered thing I said before about the 60-70 degree weather in January being weird, or possibly an ominous bellwether of global warming, or unsettling and wrong, or “too much like April,” or a sure sign of the apocalypse.

That weather wasn’t wrong. I was wrong. And now I’m paying for my mistake, one frozen toe at a time.

Anyway, I need this sweater. To complement the wool hat that I am now wearing both indoors and out.

I have taken all of your suggestions about the neckline under advisement, by the way, but I reserve the right to make an executive decision when the time comes. You’ve given me plenty to think about, though, and I appreciate it. I will endeavor to choose a style that does not make my head look like a stump.

Huh. Now that you mention it, I do see the resemblance.

I don’t know what I would do without Shelley. She keeps me young.

I have good news and I have bad news. Bad news first: you’re stuck with me this week because Sarah is taking a little well-earned vacation from the blog. What? Yes, you can be excused to go mix yourself a cocktail. Even if it is 9 a.m. where you are.

The good news is that I’ve planned an exciting week for us, full of fun and hi-jinks! Or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Hold onto your proverbial hats! Or pull up your socks. (Hmm. A particular set of thematic resonances has caused the phrase, “It’s too late to save your shoes,” to pop to mind, but I feel almost certain that it has no place here. Ahem.)

Time out of mind is progressing nicely:

Yessir, that’s my baby!

He’s even pretty when you get really close to him, which is more than can be said for most people:

No sir, don’t mean maybe!

While Icarus was my irrepressible bad boy, Time is turning out to be meditative and laid back and mellow. I found him hanging out with my Om necklace the other day, in fact.

Om shanti shanti shanti…

While Time is off in the other room chanting in Sanskrit, let’s talk. I would like to solicit your opinions, if I may. Certain design decisions regarding Time have…how to put this delicately?…not been made. Yes, it’s true. I swatched, I made a few calculations, I cast on, and I cast off! For unknown realms!

Here be dragons: I have not made any final decision about Time’s neckline. And although it may be somewhat ethically questionable to make such a momentous decision behind his back, especially given that it will have such a huge impact on his life and his sense of style and, possibly, his yoga practice, I’m afraid Time’s failure to speak out on the subject has left the matter entirely in my hands.

And now yours. I initially thought a turtleneck would be nice, until I realized that I was working with Malabrigo. You make a turtleneck outta Malabrigo, you make a sweater that—given the current pace of global warming—will be literally unwearable anywhere on this planet within eight years. An inconvenient truth.

The current thinking (and I should add here that this reflects the collected wit and wisdom of a quartet of Woolcott employees: me, the remarkable Kat, the delightful Kerry, and the incomparable Sean) favors a modification of my original, sweltering, nightmarish vision: a funnel-neck (or mock turtleneck) with cable continuity.

But there are other possibilities, of course. And admittedly, we were all hopped up on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and chocolate chip muffins when we last discussed this, and knitters will say anything after you get a couple of chocolate chip muffins in them. In fact, some attorneys consider knitters no longer capable of giving informed consent under extreme conditions of “muffin inebriation.” Coffee does not ameliorate the impairment, contrary to popular belief.

So about that neckline. What say you all?

In a concerted effort to keep Resolution No. Seven, I have gotten a start on my self-designed sweater.

Actually, it’s less an act of “design” than it is of “bricolage.” In other words, much though I LOVE the way this sweater is turning out (so far), I never had a great creative vision that came to me from Her Kind and Merciful Highness, the Knitting Goddess. I decided that kind of inspiration was, in fact, not forthcoming. I understand my limits, people.

Truly I say unto you, this understanding is a portion of wisdom.

At the same time, it is a portion of wisdom to give new things the old “college try!” Rah, rah, go state! So ever the classic bricoleur, I took some stuff that was ready-to-hand and rejiggered those things. Heavy, heavy assists are coming from Ann Budd, Fiona Ellis, and “my people” at Malabrigo:

In the beginning, there was the Malabrigo. The ten skeins of Malabrigo in scarlet, crying out to be a sweater.

Yarn in hand, my tinkerer’s imagination was fired by Fiona Ellis’s baby sweater in Inspired Cable Knits:

The wonderful “Ripples in time.”

I adore this miniature sweater and the cables it combines, but clearly if I was going to make a similar one for myself, certain scale issues would have to be tackled. Ahem.

Enter Ann Budd. Honestly, I think The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns is an excessively modest title for a book like this. I’d say a book that allows the design-and-mathematically-challenged knitter (Moi? Oui, moi.) to make her dream sweater is way beyond “handy.”

Miraculous, more like. Here’s what I have so far:

Close-up of cables:

In honor of Fiona Ellis and her original sweater’s homage to time, I have decided to call my sweater “Time out of mind,” yet another act of bricolage since this phrase was shamelessly and blatantly robbed from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground./So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind…

So it is, so it will be.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!