Knit Sisters

I got sick this week.  This is as inevitable as the sun coming up–every year when we go back to school, I end up catching a cold in the first few weeks.  It’s because all the snot-nosed urchins darling children bring their germs with them back to school and grade-school children are not known for their stellar personal hygiene.

I’m not severely sick, mind you, but sick enough.  Not sick enough to stay home, but sick enough to feel pretty crappy while at work.  Sick enough to be absolutely beat when I got home from school yesterday afternoon.  I lay down for “a little rest” and ended up sleeping 2 1/2 hours. 

Then, Harvey and I had our tae kwon do testing this morning.  It lasted quite a bit longer than I had expected.  Then we went to Wal-Mart.  I realize that going to Wal-Mart at noon on a Saturday shows a sad lack of defensive planning, but what can I say?  I’m sick and my faculties are not at their highest level.  In any case, 3/4 of the way through our shopping expedition, I started to feel shaky and broke out in a sweat.  Probably a combination of being (you guessed it) sick, not having eaten, expending all my energy free sparring, and having to deal with Wal-Mart at noon on Saturday.  I came home, lay down for another “little rest” and slept 3 hours.  (Why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.  Thanks for asking.)

All of the above is a long explanation of why this post is late.  See, I’m sick.

I have, however, made some progress on the sherbet socks.  I finished the first one:

 

Here’s a detail of the toe.  I thought about using a different toe shaping, like a star toe or something, but when it came right down to it, I crapped out and used my standard short-row toe as per Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.  I’ve used this heel/toe shaping so much I can do it with one eye closed, and I just didn’t feel I had the energy to conquer a new toe shaping that might have involved math or something.  (Because, well, I’m sick.)

I started casting on for the second sock, but that’s not a very compelling picture. 

My next sock project will be for Rob, because he needs a new pair of socks for his new job, I think.  I know this flies directly in the face of “The Year of Knitting for Me,” but there it is.  A decision made in a moment of sickness weakness.  I collect sock yarn in sedate, male colors for him. (He will wear self-striping yarns, but only if they’re subdued.  By the way, this is a great way to build your stash–“But honey, that yarn is for socks for you!”)  Two candidates for the position of next socks:

 

Rob’s leaning toward the grey colorway.  I myself kind of like the sand colorway.

Alex, I’m sorry I missed your birthday!  I hope you had a good day and a good birthday week.  I do have a little something for you, which I’ll try to get in the mail this week.  Happy quarter century to you!

Suitably enough, I learned from Alison Bechdel’s wonderful, though harrowing, graphic novel/memoir Fun Home, shown here harmonizing beautifully with Sarah’s handspun:

that in the circus, the sort of acrobatics that involve one person lying on the floor and balancing another in the air are known as “Icarian games.”

Check it out! Page three. I’m knitting a shawl called Icarus and reading a book which mentions Icarian games on its very first full page.

Just coincidence? Or does everything happen for a reason?

Um. Yeah. Probably just coincidence.

But what a cool synergy! Bechdel returns to the Icarus myth throughout her memoir as a way of elucidating her relationship with her father, but she says nothing about Icarus’s shenanigans in Vegas. A missed opportunity, I’d say!

My Icarus now forms veritable pink dunes when you look at him from the side:

I left the room for a minute and discovered this intrepid Marine storming the ridges:

Forward troops! If we gain ground tonight, we can be over Heartbreak Hill and onto the fourth chart by morning!

I’m really savoring every minute I have with this Alchemy Haiku, both because I love it and because I’ve decided that there will be no more yarn buying for a while. So the yarn I have (which is admittedly not what you’d call a meager collection, except when compared to my sister’s stash…) must be enjoyed to the fullest.

Happily, on the very heels of this soul-destroying yarn-diet decision, my friend Tope generously gave me some Rowan 4-ply Botany she got from someone who was destashing:

Tope is no great fan of pink, and, as you may have noticed, I am. And yes, my friends, frugal is such an ugly word.

Tope’s gift of the wonderful and discontinued Botany really took the edge off. There are actually four skeins, but two are shy.

Thank you, Tope!

Let us speak no further of this yarn diet. It can only bring us sorrow.

Meanwhile, Alex is celebrating his birthday this week, consistent with our tradition of stretching every birthday celebration out for at least seven days. Sometimes, if you are clever, you can get ten days out of it, but that’s rare.

Last night, Nasser, who asked that I inform you that he also answers to “Omar Sharif,” came over for a birthday dinner:

My good man, how does it feel to be a quarter of a century old?

Shelley received a rubber chicken as part of the evening’s festivities:

Mmm. Chicken dinner. Chicken dinner…

And Nasser checked the internet for helpful advice for men turning twenty-five:

The only consistent message was that a man of this age will generally be happier, more fit, and more successful in all areas of his life if he chooses the companionship of a somewhat older woman.

Fortunately, Alex already knew this.

Happy Birthday, Alex! And many more!

In answer to a couple of questions:

Yes, I think any leaf-themed original design is fair game for the contest, even if it was designed at some other time. 

And Barbara asked about when I learned to spin and if it was hard.  The first part of that question is easier to answer than the second!  I taught myself to spin on a drop spindle in 2002, so I really have not been spinning that long.  I went to NY Sheep and Wool in the fall of 2001 and discovered that the yarns I coveted most were the handspun yarns that people had for sale.  Instead of buying these yarns, I bought myself a drop spindle, some roving, and a spindle spinning book.  I kind of put them aside until that winter, when I just decided that I was going to figure out how to spin, no matter how long it took!  I looked at my book, gathered a few little tips, and dove in.

My family jokes that they always knew when I dropped the spindle on the floor, because I would let fly with a “Shit!”  And I guess that leads to the second part of the question:  is it hard?  Like many things that you do with your hands, spinning takes practice.  Somewhere I remember reading that when you are learning to spin, you should spin at least a little bit every day, to really cement the feel and the process into your muscle memory.  Like knitting, it’s a skill that you hold in your hands, and no amount of studying is going to make you proficient without the actual practice. 

Personally, I think you just have to be determined to learn and make up your mind not to give up.  I also believe that it’s a good idea to learn on a top-whorl drop spindle, so that you can really get the feel of drafting before you have to learn to manage a wheel.  It’s also a much, much smaller outlay of money–you can decide if it’s really something you want to pursue.  (A decent beginner spindle can be purchased for $10 or $12–I learned on a $10 Louet top-whorl.)

And speaking of spinning, my progress on the lime superwash:

                                                         I’m getting there, slowly but surely.

I’ve been working on the sherbet socks, too.

                                  Halfway on the first sock.

Hey, here’s a funny picture of my little (ha, ha) feet wearing my one half-sock on the spinning wheel treadles.

 

Hugo thinks this whole half-sock thing is highly suspicious.

                                     “Do I have to wait until you’re done with those before you take me for a walk, or what?”

(I’m still working on the secret project, as well.  Of this we will not speak…)

Back in August, when I was still on the road, New England was still a steaming inferno, and the world was just a little younger than it is today, my sister issued a design challenge.

She challenged all of you to design original knitwear of any shape, size, or description as long as it incorporated a leaf mofit, any leaf motif. All entries received by October 15th would be entered in a contest and the designers of the best three would receive a prize of my sister’s handspun.

At the same time, she beat me with a copy of Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns until I agreed encouraged me to design a leafy something, despite the fact that I have never designed anything before in my life. And bitterly enough in the spirit of fairness and decency, my design would naturally not be included in the competition since I am a partner and stakeholder in KnitSisters Enterprises.

She even gave me handspun superwash wool

for inspiration.

Last night, I placed that lovely yarn on top of these helpful books

and left it there overnight. I had heard that sometimes if you get the right combination of books and yarn, a special alchemical reaction occurs and a great design idea is there just waiting for you in the morning.

So far, no luck. But that’s why I’m starting early, you see, while I still have time to monkey with the book-to-yarn ratio and run further experiments.

But seriously, I am certain that when my sister suggested that I “design a little something,” she was chuckling to herself at the thought of how she and everyone else in the contest would kick my butt from here to South Perth eager to see me expand my knitterly horizons and exercise my creativity so that I too could soar on wings of woolly inspiration.

In that spirit, I am panicking waiting in a peaceful zen-like manner to see what the design goddesses whisper in my ear.

Even if the worst happens and my design is shamefully subpar, I can erase my identity and live out the rest of my life under an assumed name in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal chalk it up to experience and laugh along with the rest of you at my awkward freshman effort.

So far, the design goddesses have said only one thing: “Socks.”

I also thought I heard one of them say, “If you build it, he will come,” but that may have just been my imagination.

On a much nicer note, there is more of Icarus to love all the time:

He agreed to a close-up:

Actual color may vary and in fact be a heckuva lot more like what you see in the next picture, but what can you do?

And finally,

Icarus, bright and dark.

There isn’t much to say about the actual knitting process, except that the rows are getting longer (as the days get shorter…), but I’m not getting bored.

After all, in these trying times—what with skunks roaming the back yard and this design challenge hanging over my head—it is consoling to know that I can still knit my way out of a paper bag produce something beautiful. That is, thanks to the design genius of my fiber-arts superiors like Miriam, whose efforts—believe me—I only respect more with each passing day.

KnitSisters will be closed today in observance of the Labor Day holiday.

We’re plumb tuckered out from all that knitting, spinning, and skunk chasing.

But we’ll be back tomorrow with more fun and high jinks as Ellen attempts to design a small item of knitwear with a leaf motif in honor of the Fall 2006 KnitSisters Design Contest…and learns the true meaning of “total incompetence.”

Tune in Tuesday for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) epic adventure in the fiber arts.

One woman. Ninety bazillion knitting books. Two beautiful skeins of her sister’s handspun. Minimal math skills. No vision.

The odds are long and the path is rocky. Can she succeed, or will this merely become an irresistible opportunity for her vastly more talented sister to mock her? We’ll find out when KnitSisters returns!

Until then, Happy Labor Day! Don’t lift a finger now, y’hear?

Some of you know that I have, ahem, a rather large stash.  I’ve been thinking lately about some of the yarns and fibers in the stash that may very probably never be knitted or spun because they are just too lovely, rare, and/or otherwise precious.

This is kind of a weird phenomenon, I know, and completely inexplicable to non-knitters and even some knitters who do not stash.  (Yes, it’s true, there are knitters like that out there.  Bizarre.)  But some things are just so beautiful in the skein that I feel I could never, never do them justice on the needles.  Other yarns have been discontinued; if I used them I would never be able to get more!  Still others I only have one or two skeins of, having purchased only that many for reasons that are lost to memory.  (Usually these reasons have to do with finances, sadly.) 

Here’s a good example of that first category:

                                      This is handspun singles yarn from a handpainted roving.  I have a fear that whatever I make from this will not live up to the yarn.  I was really happy with this yarn when I spun it; what if I ruin it when I knit it?

                                                       Hand-dyed (but not by me) alpaca laceweight.  This photo cannot possibly convey the delicate beauty of this stuff.  Again, what if I ruin it or pick the wrong pattern?  I have a sinking feeling this yarn won’t respond well to ripping out.

In the second category:

                                      Green Mountain Spinnery Silkspun in a gorgeous vibrant purple, which unfortunately, my camera did not pick up well.  I bought this on sale some years ago, and I only have six skeins.  This yarn is discontinued; if I knit with it, then I won’t have it anymore, see?

                                        Austermann Angora Wolle.  I only got three balls from Elann when it was for sale; now there is no more.  This sort of falls into the third category, as well.  What am I going to do with just three balls?

And, squarely in the third category:

                                                     this one ball of hand-painted singles.  I got this at NY Sheep and Wool several years back.  I know now that I should have purchased many more balls, but alas, I did not.

As far as fibers go, I think my main problem is simply not knowing what to do with certain things.  This is particularly true of these two small batches of hand-dyed mohair curls.

They’re sooo pretty just as they are!  And shiny!  I just don’t have enough faith in my spinning ability to tackle these.  What’s spun is spun. 

So, for all these yarns and fibers, my only solution for now is to go to the stash from time to time and visit them.  Pull them out.  Pet them.  Admire them.  What can I say?  Knitters are freaky people.

Before I recount my latest canine-related misadventure and my predictably slow progress on Icarus, I just want to point out that my sister’s cookie recipes are the absolute best and if you haven’t seen her post from yesterday, take a look and get that recipe!

She was always such a great baker—even as a small child—that I myself never bothered to learn to bake. What was the point really, when she was (and is) so much better at it?

Besides, I was always the kind of kid who’d get bored halfway through a batch of cookies. You know, making those little balls exactly the same size so they’d bake evenly and all that.

So I’d just take the rest of the dough and make one really, really big cookie.

That cookie would never bake. Or it would, but the others would burn up in the meantime.

Hey, come to think of it, maybe the same thing happened with the United States. About the time they hit Ohio, one of the guys in charge of carving up territory said to the other, “Listen, dude, if we make all these states the same size as New Hampshire, we’ll never get finished. Look at all this land we got left! We gotta start making these bigger.”

At the end of the day, they made one really, really big state and called it California. And that explains why California—bless its big, beautiful, alternative, West Coast heart!—has always kind of “baked at a different rate” than all the other states.

Here on the home front, Miss Shelley, shown here giving you the “junkyard dog” hairy eyeball,

has once again been defending her turf. Unfortunately for both her and for me, she is apparently unable to discern the differences between an intruder like, say, a groundhog—which she can dispatch with almost frightening haste to his hoggy reward—and one like, say, a skunk.

If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, “Shelley, Shelley, the skunk always wins in the end. They’re the casinos of the animal world.”

But does she listen? Does she listen? No. No, I tell you!

I don’t have to take this crap. I’m going outside to see if I can rustle me up some skunks.

Last night, we’re sitting on the sofa reading, Shelley is outside on one of her routine perimeter checks, and the cat is on the phone to Homeland Security reporting us for “suspicious behavior” and requesting that the apartment be bugged by NSA—typical quiet evening at home—when Alex says, “I think I smell a skunk.”

“Ha, ha,” I say. “I’m sure it’s just that I’m cleaning the oven and it produces strange fumes.” Since I’ve never cleaned the oven before, neither he nor I could possibly know what it smells like, but my feeble attempts at housekeeping are a topic for another day.

“No,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I smell skunk.”

Just then, Shelley bursts through the dog door into the back hall and starts writhing about on the carpet, encrusted with dirt, foaming at the mouth, and running at the nose.

Skunked. R.I.P., carpet.

I grab her, hustle her into the tub, and yell to Alex for backup. First we have to give her a conventional bath to get the mud off, then we have to repeatedly apply a mixture of baking soda, white vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide to her muzzle to cut the skunk spray.

This procedure is met with an unfavorable response from the canine unit.

By the end of it, it is difficult to discern if the situation is better, or if we have just spread the stench around. Our olfactory systems have burned out. This is a small, but significant, blessing.

But there is icing on this fetid cake! I take my hand off the dog for a microsecond and she hops out of the tub and shakes violently, showering the entire bathroom with water and whatever remains of the skunk oil.

Good times, good times.

I could only go back to Icarus once I was sure that I wouldn’t contaminate him.

Nothing was ever said about flying too near a skunk, after all.

Real progress is being made, but you have to be very, very discerning to see it.

How like life!

If you have any peanut butter chocolate chip cookies kind words to raise me out of my skunk funk, please pass them along. I assure you, they will be richly appreciated.

I have been working diligently on my new design that I can’t show you, so I guess that would be the end of that discussion.  (I do have to say here, though, that this whole “full time job” thing is really getting in the way of my knitting time.  Re-entry has been hard this year.)

But I’ve also been back at the wheel doing a little spinning, trying to finish up that lime superwash.

Progress:

 

Another view, where you can see the single strand better:

                                OK, I admit, this second photo is a bit gratuitous, but I don’t have much in the way of photos today.  (That would be because the project I’m working on I can’t show you.  See above.)

I had an interesting offer yesterday from someone who would like me to make cookies for them every month and ship them (the cookies) to them (the person).  I was trained as a pastry chef and actually worked as a pastry chef for a while.  Although I don’t work in the industry anymore (long story), I do make wedding cakes, specialty cakes, and other baked goods/pastries for private clients.

This offer got me thinking about cookies and their general goodness, and then I thought about one of my favorite cookie recipes.  I decided that it would be fun to share this recipe on the blog today.  (Please note:  This is an original recipe of mine, so I’m not violating anyone’s copyright.)

So, without further ado, I offer you my recipe for

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 1/2 c. (3 sticks) butter 

3 c. brown sugar 

3 tsp. baking soda 

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 1/2 tsp. salt  

1 1/2 c. crunchy peanut butter 

3 eggs 

4 1/2 c. flour 

4 c. (24 oz.) chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375.  Cream butter, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in mixer until light.  Add peanut butter, beating until well-blended.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add flour; mix until blended.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Scoop onto ungreased cookie sheets.  Flatten with fork in a criss-cross pattern.  Bake 8-10 minutes, or until cookies just start to brown on top.  Cool on a wire rack.

Notes:  This is a big recipe.  Use a 4 1/2- or 5-quart mixer. 

Adding the baking powder, soda, and salt to the butter and sugar when you cream them is a little trick I learned in cooking school.  Doing this really distributes the small amounts of these ingredients throughout the dough, and because all three are granular (like sugar), it doesn’t interfere with the creaming process.

I use a small ice cream scoop to portion my cookies.  It works great, is quick, and they all end up being the same size. 

The night before I flew home from Denver, the clouds looked truly ominous:

Uh, Captain, that don’t look like flyin’ weather to me.

But the next day was clear and beautiful. After the flight took off, the folksy Chuck-Yeagerish captain got on the intercom and said, “Way-ell folks, looks like we’re anticipatin’ a smooth ride ahead all the way through to Pittsburgh. (I had a connection in Pittsburgh.) So I’m gonna turn off the seat belt sign now, and feel free to get up and move about the cabin!”

Famous last words.

The turbulence was so bad that the flight attendant informed me that we weren’t allowed to have hot beverages.

I said, “Well, then, have you got any Valium?”

Worse yet, there was a guy two rows behind me who was keeping up an exhaustive running commentary on everything going on inside the airplane. Not much actually goes on inside an airplane, as it turns out.

Commentator: Why, lookee there! Those little screens are coming down for the movie.

Other passengers: (Complete silence.)

Commentator: Guess we’re going to have the movie now.

Other passengers: (More silence.)

Commentator: Whoo-hoo. Goin’ over some bumps there! Heh, heh.

Other passengers: (Tense silence.)

Commentator: Just like ridin’ a roller coaster! Except up in the sky!

Other passengers: (Increasingly tense silence, much like the quiet that precedes a violent outburst.)

As Our Mutual Friend nattered on, it became abundantly clear why we are not allowed to take handguns on airplanes. It has absolutely nothing to do with hijacking.

I kept knitting:

The implications of flying with Icarus are not all that comforting.

Close-up he looks like this:

No feathers yet…

The Commentator kept commenting. I put my earphones in and turned my iPod up. Kept knitting. Tried to think about cheery things like how much I like knitting with Alchemy Haiku and how cool Icarus is going to look once he gets some feathers.

Eventually, though, we started our descent and I was forced to relinquish use of my annoying-fellow-passenger blocker iPod. About that time, the pilot came on again:

“Way-ell, folks, we’re goin’ through some little rainstorms here in Ohio and it looks like the ride is goin’ to kind of deteriorate from here.”

Deterioriate? It was actually going to get worse?

At this point, a small child two rows in front of me started screaming, “I want down! I want my Daddy!”

I could not have put it better myself. What an articulate and sensible child!

Two rows behind me, The Commentator kept commenting.

I thought, “There are people in the third ring of hell who would refuse to trade places with us right now.”

The gratitude I felt when those wheels hit the runway is almost beyond description. The Commentator must have felt the very same way because he announced in a loud voice, “Well, well, well, here we are! Back on good ole terra cotta!”

Way-ell, folks, that’s right. Good ole “terra cotta.” But at a moment like this, why sweat the details?

I’m really glad I made it back, too, because when I finally arrived in Boston, Lorinda had sent me contest booty:

Gorgeous! Thank you, Lorinda! It’s good to be a winner.

More happy surprises were in store. When I left, our sunporch looked approximately like this:

Behold and quake in fear! I am the Sunporch of the Damned!

Without so much as a gentle prod, in my absence Alex had transformed the Sunporch of the Damned into this:

Architectural Digest hasn’t called yet, but personally I’m impressed by the sheer magnitude of the effort.

Bravo, Alex!

It’s good to be back home. Terra cotta never looked better.

On Saturday I met my friend Deb at the local Borders for some knitterly camaraderie.  We had a lovely couple of hours:  knitting, chatting, and making fun of some of the more horrifying designs in the new knitting mags. 

 

I worked on (and am continuing to work on) a new design which I am hoping to submit to Knitty.  Unfortunately, since I am hoping to submit it, I don’t feel I can or should offer photos on the blog.  So I offer you the following pictures and discussion of a UFO which has been languishing in a bag for several months. 

The yarn is Classic Elite “Studio” 70% viscose, 30% linen, which I purchased a few years back at The Studio in KC.  It was on sale, so I bought all I could of five colors.  The yarn has a beautiful sheen and is very soft; in fact, being a soft-spun single, it is almost fragile.  I thought for a long time about what to make with this yarn.  It had to be something multi-colored, since I didn’t have enough of any one color to make an entire sweater, but I did have more of the light green than any of the other colors.  What I finally settled on was a patterned yoke sweater in the style of a Lopi pullover.

 

In fact, I stole the yoke pattern from a sweater in The Best of Lopi.  Of course, the gauge on this yarn is smaller than the Lopi yarns; I think I’m knitting it to about 5.5 stitches per inch.  (This is one problem with setting projects aside for so long–you forget the vital statistics.  You have to hope that you had the foresight to write them down somewhere.  Then you have to hope that you can find the place where you wrote them down.)

I was a little worried that translating the yoke pattern to a much smaller gauge would throw off the decreasing rate, but actually, it has seemed to work just fine.  Actually, in my case, it’s an increasing rate, because I’m working from the top down.

It took me a little while to get the hang of stranding with this yarn, since it has no elasticity whatsoever.  (I wouldn’t recommend that for a first stranding project!)  I’m still a little worried that the yarn really is too fragile for what I’m asking it to do, and that once the sweater is finished it will just pill and abrade itself into nothingness as it’s worn.  But it’s too late to turn back now.  Ripping this stuff out is just the kiss of death for the yarn.

But it sure is pretty, no?  Maybe if I can’t wear it I can hang it on the wall.