Little Things

The Shepherd sweater grinds on, but I'm afraid I've been afflicted with Second Sleeve Syndrome even before I'm quite down to the cuff of the first one. My excuse is that it's no longer mindless banging along, easily done while watching movies or tv. It's pay-attention knitting: pay attention to the cabling pattern and how it works into the decreases; pay attention to the stitch count and the decreases; pay attention to making the decreasing and cabling come to an end at just the right place to end the sleeve at the right length and have a couple of inches of k4 p2 rib to finish. Sheesh! I guess these are the dues for going my own way with the basic design. Some days I'm incredibly pleased with myself for cooking up an adaptation that works so well for me and eager for the finished product; other days I just want to catch up on Downton Abbey and zone out a bit.

So let's see what's happened lately in the zone-out zone:

 Not two hats, but one reversible hat, as modeled by my favorite Library Head, Willa Cather. It's the Esprit Reversible Cap (free, by the way) made with Cascade Fixation Solid and Spray Dyed. I love the way the hat feels on the head. The yarn is cotton and elastic, so it's very huggy and likely to stay put. I needed a hat to go with my red coat and this fits the bill (and the noggin) nicely.

What to do with the leftover yarn? Booties, of course!

The Fixation booties are a big 6-12 month-old size. And the dark ones are from the remainder of the dark Fassett stripe sweater. (Yes, I'm still working on sewing it up. It's got an awful lot of long seams that really have to be worked on in daylight.)

And in celebration of booties, I bring you this song about the other kind of boo-tay. A ditty I was first introduced to as the sound track of a YouTube paean to the rear view of Mr Benedict Cumberbatch:



Oh, okay. Here you go, fangirls. The Cumberbooty.

Dry Dock

My Sixareen Cape is in dry dock for the time being. I have overcome a bunch of obvious errors in the pattern, but this last one is a deal-breaker. The pattern says to decrease the top until you have 82 stitches. Seriously? Can a normal human being get their head through such a tiny hole? Adding insult to injury, the pattern illustration shows a loose, flow-y top more like a cowl than a constipated turtleneck. Something is very wrong here. Is it the decreasing? My gauge is OK. WTF???  Sadly, the discussion on the Ravelry group hasn't been much help. Most of it is about misunderestimation of yarn quantities--been there--and there is an entry from Kate saying that a corrected pattern is available for those who downloaded it on Ravelry, not much help to those of us who purchased a hard copy through MagCloud. I have emailed Kate requesting a way to get corrections, but she is in the midst of her house/business move and will not be available for a response for some time. Hence the dry dock. I'm sure a solution is forthcoming, just not for a while. And I think some frogging is in my future.

But does the knitting stop just because one project is on the rocks? Certainly not.

There's the dark Kaffe Fassett stripe sweater, for one thing. And I found some cheesy acrylic yarn with sequins (sequins!) that makes really darling "dress-up" baby booties. And is that more Sour Cherries sock yarn I spy? Mm hmm. Because you don't have to have an actual baby in the pipeline to knit a cute baby sweater. If you build it, they will come. I think I know the right baby for it, but it's pretty hard to tell the exact size until a Baby Surprise sweater is nearly done.

Rowing Along in My Sixareen*

The Alaska summer has turned a corner, folks. the sunshine and relative heat are no more. Birch leaves are starting to turn yellow and the intermittent rain is greening up the forest moss. Time to realize that the cold is coming and that there will be a time when I will want the warmth of my Sixareen Cape. I've now got two of the three fair isle pattern repeats done, which feels like a big accomplishment when there are 414 stitches in each round.

The dark Fassett stripe sweater is coming along, too--the back is almost done--but not very photo-worthy yet. Good thing I also have a new pair of booties on the go:

A really sweet colorway of a cotton/wool/elastic sock yarn called Cherry Sours. It's even more charming in Spanish: Caramelos Cereza Agria. Isn't it funny how they can take two colors I'm not all that crazy about, pink (I really get tired of all the pinky stuff they make nowdays. It's like pink is the flag of the double X chromosome.) and green (because green is so, well, green.) And put together with a strange pinky muddy light brown in little baby footies I can't help sighing awwwwwww every time I look at them. I even find myself thinking this yarn would make a really darling baby surprise jacket, and I don't even know anybody offhand who is expecting a person who could wear it.

You may also have noticed a particular vegetable theme in the photos. That's because I'm capital-T-Thrilled that I am going to have tomatoes this year! For the past 2 summers it has not been warm enough for my tomato plants to set fruit. Two years! Big plants, lots of blossoms, but it has to be at least 70 degrees or so for the flowers to set fruit, and even up next to the south-facing house wall, they weren't able to manage more than a couple of wee green marbles. I'm counting on the fruit being all the sweeter for the long wait.

*A Sixareen is a Shetland boat. Look it up here. And video of an authentic re-creation is here.

80 Booties!

Here they are--80 baby booties for my daughter's 40 babies. No, she's not one-upping the octomom. She's a midwife in training that will have to deliver 40 babies to complete her clinical training. And there's a pair of booties for her to give to each one. You can read the saga of the booties here and subsequent posts, or you can click on the bootie tag below.

But, hey, first feast your eyes on their bootie beauty:

 Go ahead, click on the pic and blow it up bigger. Count 'em. They're all there. All 80. All 40 pairs. All unique, as each little person will be.

Every brand-new person landing safe in the world in a brand-new midwife's hands.

Booties in Retreat

 Through these portals pass the most wonderful knitters in the world!

See? The lace arrow points the way up the hill to the cabin where 8 knitters had a fabulous time knitting, drinking, eating, soaking in the hot tub, and laughing and laughing and laughing. It rained a lot, but who cares?

I reached a major landmark--the 40th and final pair of booties in the Big Mess o' Booties for my daughter's upcoming deliveries. Celebrated with an introduction to Screech, the Newfoundland rum made infamous by the Yarn Harlot. There's a quaint ceremony called the Screech-in, which involves reciting some doggerel and kissing a codfish (on the lips!). This is supposed to make one an honorary Newfoundlander. A Canadian friend recommends wearing a lot of chapstick for the fish kissing so that your lips don't taste of cod for hours afterward. Not having the required codfish, I Screeched-in the ultimate pair with a Screech and orange juice and left it at that.

By the way, in contrast to the sound of its name, Screech is an amazingly smooth rum when drunk neat. Not at all like its reputation from its early days. Long may your big jib draw!

And it didn't even rain all the time. There was a brief window in which the clouds broke apart to show what they'd been doing to the mountaintops:

Easy Bein' Cheesy

Sometimes it seems like there's more than one reason it's called fireweed.

And there's more than one way for a rose plant to be rosy.

It's autumn all over the place, and bootie knitting continues apace. Remember the Cheat-toes booties? Well, we now have a new flavor of cheese. Once I got these guys knitted up, I couldn't help noticing the similarity to blue cheese. See what I mean?

(Actual blue cheese added for comparison.) It's Fortissima sock yarn in #104 blau tweed colorway.

And here's another pair in a fun color. A cheese-free color.

(Actual comics and Pollock added for comparison.) The yarn was supposed to be for a Knit Purl sock club creation in a colorway inspired by the Jackson Pollock painting Image Number 8. But I wasn't especially excited by the pattern intended for it, and totally tickled to death by the way it looks in booties. And the more I looked at the yarn, the less I thought of Jackson Pollock and the more I thought of the way papier mache looks when made out of the comics section of the Sunday paper. What do you think?

A Digital Snow Day....or Four

I overheard the phrase "digital snow day", and that's what we've had here since Tuesday night at about 10 pm when a huge windstorm  blew zillions of trees down in Anchorage chopping up the electrical grid into a baroque patchwork of haves and have-nots.

Amazingly, there were no deaths and few injuries, probably because the real destruction started about 10 pm on a weeknight. Property damage is another story. Check here for a slideshow. We were extremely lucky here at El Rancho Ptarmigan, given that our lot is all woods, no lawn. Only a couple of small ones down in the woods out back. Next door they were not so lucky.

A big spruce splintered and crashed down on the neighbor's car. The good news: it missed the rv he lives in part-time, and he was away in the car he usually parks beside the black one when he's home. The bad news: the black car was for sale. The dent on the top and the broken windshield mean it's totaled.  The good news: it was insured.

Wednesday morning when you stepped outside your door the sound of chainsaws came from every direction. It seems that 75% of Alaskan households have chainsaws, and the amateur lumberjacks and -jills set to with zeal unblocking roads and clearing yards and driveways. It was astounding how quickly so many trees became firewood.

Because the power outages were caused by so many line breaks, there seemed little logic to which houses were off and which were on. On our street, we were divided right in the middle--the 2 houses on the west came back on at 7 am the next morning, while the 2 on the east including ours were off seemingly forever. This had its jealousy aspects (Why us and not them??  No fair that the vacant house is on!!!) and its good-neighborly aspects. Power for charging batteries and water were near at hand and gladly shared.

And that brings me to the water. In our part of town we get our water from wells, not city water mains. That means that power outages deprive the pumps of electricity and us of H2O for drinking, cooking, coffee, washing, bathing, and--the biggest--FLUSHING. You suddenly realize how much clean water we throw away every day when you have to scrounge enough to fill a toilet tank. We had enough water in our emergency supply to keep us hydrated and to wash a few dishes, but it wasn't till we started hauling from the neighbors that we had any to spare for the plumbing.

It was a weird kind of disaster because it was so hard to tell how long it would go on. The usual power outages are no more than a few hours, and for the first day or so we kept expecting it to come back on at any minute. If we had had an earthquake or a hurricane, we would know to organize and plan for a week or more's worth of hardship. But there was no telling when we'd hear those beautiful beeps, hums, and clicks that means we're back in the 21st century.

We were fortunate in the time of year this occurred. Temperatures were in the 40's - 60's. Had this been January, the house would have frozen solid, with all the damage that a frozen water and heating system would mean. There was a little extra chill in the house, but nothing extra blankets, sweaters, and the fireplace couldn't dispel. The big south-facing windows warmed us up during the day.

The whole experience has been a big emergency preparedness wake-up for us and for the whole city. This was very gentle by disaster standards, and a lot of it was not fun. We live in earthquake country where The Big One will not be forecast by the weatherman, nor will it leave our neighbors unaffected. Here's what I've learned:

• It was good we had emergency water, lots of batteries, candles and firewood on hand.
• We need to store more water and have bigger containers.
• When there's a big windstorm in the forecast, I'm going to duct tape the drains and fill up the bathtubs.
• We're researching the type of generator necessary to keep the pump and heating going during an outage.
• It would be a good idea to have a cash stash. When the stores had no power, the only transactions allowed were cash.
• It was good to be cooking with gas. We at least had the stovetop to heat water and food.
• A metal bucket would be a good idea. You could wash things in it; you could put it on a wood fire to heat a big quantity of water. 

And what of knitting? This is a knitting blog after all. Without electronic distractions, there was knitting time, but only during daylight hours. I did add 2 1/2 more pairs of booties to the pile. But knitting had to compete with reading for daylight and battery time. Sometimes it lost.

Half the Booties Done!

 

 You've heard about babies being delivered to the cabbage patch, right? (no, not those silly dolls) Well, here is baby bootie pair #20 found in the lettuce patch. In case you're wondering, they're a wool and soy fiber blend, TOFUtsies yarn by name. Halfway to the bootie goal!

Bootie-Scootin' Boogie

I'm sure you were tossing and turning last night wondering if I have run out of gas on the bootie/blanket marathon. After all, it's been a month since the last blog post. Actually, you could have checked the scorecard on the right--the numbers are ratcheting up regularly. And feast your eyes on this:

Baby boots among the summer herbs. Actually, the two projects work well together. The booties are small and portable. When at home, the latest boot-on-the-go is on my desk, ready for long telephone calls or online videos. Easy to pick up and take out on the deck, in the car, etc. It's fun to come up with different color combinations, and each yarn feels slightly different flowing through the fingers. It's great to be putting odd bits of sock yarn to good use. (OK, the white merino was a purchase, but it was on sale. I promise! And it's soooooo soft, it was begging for baby toes to cuddle.)

The blanket squares really require an established knitting station with all the current yarns in play in reach, remaining balls nearby, pattern binder, pen, label stickers, scissors...you get the idea. With all of the necessaries to hand and a good movie, I can crank out about 5 squares in an evening, but it's just not a portable project. My least favorite part is the blocking. No matter how organized you are, it's a bit of a headache to keep the squares identified with their labels off and very pin-fiddly sticking them to the board.  The reward comes with the seaming and making a section of the big picture come together. That's why I added the block count to the scorecard. Maybe making notches in the blog will motivate me to block some more. There are several sections ready and waiting.

Progress Is Progressing

Here's what I've been up to lately:

Both concentric squares, a pair of booties, and the latest block sewn together!

Bitten

Mosquitoes are biting, but I'm not sure what kind of ambition bug just bit me. I've got a massive case of startitis and this is what has happened--

I got an email from KnitPicks promising a hefty discount and I ran off and ordered pattern and yarn for this:

A Viola blanket. I've been smitten by this design for a very long time; love the almost abstract look of the giant flower, love all the shades of red, the crazy garter-stitchy plan of it, the sheer massive SIZE of it (about 4 x 5 feet, if you're asking). 4-inch garter stitch squares, 206 of them, sewn together in this great big cosy bloom. There are plain straight squares, mitered squares, diagonal squares, and one 4-miters square, most with stripes, just about everything you could do with the form. Here's where I've got so far:

Started with the plain squares, of course. Gauge is pretty close, certainly nothing blocking can't sort out. Did I mention each one of these guys has to be individually blocked before sewing? The blanket of 206 squares begins with the first piece.

But hold on, there's more! My idiocy knows no bounds! My daughter, the nurse, is in the midst of graduate studies on the way to becoming a midwife and Advanced Nurse Practitioner in womens' health. The clinical crowning glory of this is to deliver 40 babies. 40! That's more than a classroom of children.  Enough team members for just about any kind of sports match. The population of a small hamlet. And the first thing that will happen to all these people when they enter the world, will be to land in my daughter's hands. Something to make a mama proud, that's for sure.

So I have decided to knit a pair of booties for each of her babies, 40 pairs, 80 booties total. A celebration of the achievement of the making of a midwife, the making of a new person, and the making of a new mother. Handing on the love.

I've got a secret, though. Because I've been caught on the hop before by the sudden appearance of babies in my circle of acquaintance, I worked up a bootie stash:

That's 9 pairs right there, nearly a quarter of the way to the total, provided there are no other surprise deliveries along the way.

Let the madness begin!

Sunny Boy

The sun/star/giant yellow doily baby blanket is done and ready to come down from blocking. In spite of how the points are hemmed per instructions to keep from curling, they still curl. Nothing to be done about it, I'm afraid. A little attention with a steam iron may temporarily tame them, but they'll be back to the curl soon after. In spite of that detail, I think this is pretty cool, don't you?

And to go along with it, I have employed the Cheat-Toes yarn (it's going for toes after all!) for my standard booties and a hat. Said chapeau is a trial of the Breast Hat pattern in monochrome and a much finer yarn than the DK of the original.  Because it's top-down, it's very adaptable to all manner of sizes and yarns to top the crania of babes (and adults) who are not as tickled by the boobular color scheme as those of us with skewed senses of humor and more than a little tendency to breastfeeding evangelism. No worries--there will be actual breast hats eventually. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, bright baby things certainly cheer up the Alaskan winter gloom!

Here Comes the Son

A sudden population explosion in the Ptarmigan psocial pscircle. Time to put down the socks and do some fast & furious baby knitting!

This object, which looks like a somewhat demented dreamcatcher, is actually the start of a pretty cool baby blanket, Spiral Star, as it is known in the KnitCircus Summer 2011 pattern wodge I downloaded last May. Curious thing, though. In my search for a link to lead you to it, I can't find it in the KnitCircus issue, but it is "coming soon" on Daniel Yuhas's own site, where it is called Starflower, and you can also find other amazing things he's conjured up.  If it were earlier in the pregnancy involved, I would be seriously tempted by the Anemone blanket. it looks like something a baby would have hours of fun with, but this baby is building fast--I don't have time for tentacles.

This is an Arizona baby, so, cotton. Knitpicks CotLin in Canary, just about as yellow as yellow comes for a newborn son's bright yellow sun!

For my optometrist's bun-in-the-oven, the black-and-white high-contrast vision-developing booties. and for grandnephew Leo, Proper British Booties.

Slow down, young mamas! I'm knitting as fast as I can!