purlsandmurmers

In the garden

It seems like it has been an awfully long time since we were home for a weekend, and what a lovely weekend it has been with lots of gardening, cooking, and some relaxing in front of the tele (more on that later).  It is nice to have time to putter around the house and do things I enjoy; well, except perhaps for laundry and housework. 

Having been away or injured or living through a deluge for much of April and May I was considerably behind in the yard.  Luckily the weekend has been beautiful except for a few thunderstorms and I got a lot of weeding and planting finished.  Of course there is more to do, the Maple tree has been very prolific in sending out little seedlings this year...

Spring seemed to come so late, the yard was so dreary in early May when I left for San Francisco, it is nice to spend time in it now that everything has perked up, the Azaleas are blooming (usually mid May anyway) the Irises are opening, and even the pachysandra is sending up new growth and looking lush and happy, whereas in early May it looked beaten down by snow and ice. It has been a pleasure to be outdoors.

Here is a picture of the Azalea by the front door, Yaku Princess:

Of course, after a day in the yard and an evening in the kitchen, I have not felt like tackling the two sweaters that need to be put together.  Although I can honestly say I don't mind sewing sweaters together, when I am tired and my muscles ache, I would really rather veg out in my knitting chair with some nice, simple, mindless project while we watch a movie or some other entertainment.

As you can see, the Bettina tee is coming along nicely.  I love the way the yarn looks knitted up and it is nice to work with.  Even more I love the feel of the knitted fabric, kind of light and springy and crepey.  I think this will be a favorite summer top.  I have about 13 inches here and will soon start the armhole shaping.

It would have been further along but the Friday knitting had to be frogged.  This yarn is not easy to rip out, it clings to itself and that little white yarn sticks to the other yarns and knots, nasty stuff, difficult to un-knit without unplying the yarn, but in the end mission accomplished with very little waste.

I DID MAKE A GUAGE SWATCH!!  Nonetheless, the train knitting, with the same needle on which I made the guage, was much too loosey-goosey and not at all nice.  Luckily I was tired, and only knit about 5 inches.  That was more than enough to pull out, believe me.  I seriously considered trashing it and calling the yarn shop for another skein.  Fortitude won out though.

This has happened before; I wonder if I am tense when I make the guage swatches and therefore knit tighter than usual?  Quite frequently, when I actually start knitting the sweater, all relaxed and zen like in my chair, the knitting ends up much bigger than the guage.  Should I automatically drop down a needle size from whatever I used for the guage swatch??  But it doesn't happen every time and I suspect that sometimes I am tense when I swatch because I am in a rush to find a new project, as was the case this time.  I was thinking "Oh no, I need a new project and I only have a few minutes to get it all together, what can I do in a rush?". 

Perhaps I should work guages a few projects ahead so that there will always be something in the background ready to go.  On the other hand that sounds way too organized, even for me.

Chianti or Merlot?

Well I did finish the final sleeve on Wine&Roses and got both sets of sleeves on the blocking board:

Aiko

and Wine&Roses:

Considerable shirking of all other responsibilities was required.  Now I must figure out what I am going to do about putting  Wine&Roses together and how I am going to deal with all those ends. 

I might not get it done this weekend.  If the weather is as nice as it is today there is much gardening to be accomplished.  If not, well everything is behind.  I always prefer to put off tough design and construction decisions anyway.

Yarn Candy

New Yarn is beginning to pour in!  A couple of boxes have arrived from ArtFibers in San Francisco which I haven't dared open yet, as well as several other packages.  I am still too far behind in everything else so it is safer if the boxes remain unopened.  Once I open the box I will be duty bound to take out all the yarn, caress it, play with it, dump it out on the flour and roll around in it, and nothing else will get done.  So in boxes it remains.

This is kind of like Christmas, watching the packages pile up around the tree, with anticipation building until you can actually rip off the paper and play with the goodies.

In the meantime I need a project to start tomorrow on the train to NYC.  There are several options readily available BUT I went to a yarn store while I was in Knoxville, a really wonderful store called Knit 'N Purl and guess what? I bought yarn, but not as much as I wanted to buy.

First I got this beautiful sock yarn from Lorna's Laces:

I just adore the colors and I have been thinking about knitting socks a lot lately.  I am not sure why because I have never been a big sock wearer.  Socks are portable though and easily to carry around in a bag.  I also like the idea of wearing socks and would love to wear socks with my gardening clogs or LL Bean Shoes, or just around the house, but they always slip off my heels and bunch up in the middle of my foot.  Perhaps I just need socks that fit.  Perhaps I just need hand knitted socks!  Well, if not, maybe I will knit socks for Miriam, who after all, did take me to this wonderful yarn store.

There were several other things I liked including some beautiful Noro yarns, which took considerable effort to resist I must add, but I told myself that I had just been shopping at ArtFibers after all and that package had not even arrived from California yet when I left for Knoxville.

I did however buy this:

Admittedly I was primarily attracted b y the color.  It is actually kind of orange and deep burgundy, forgive the bad lighting but it is STILL raining outside.  The orange may be too orange for me, but if that proves to be the case I can finish the edges of the shell I plan to make with a coordinating burgundy yarn.  I am not worried.  I have confidence that anything that I love can be made to work.

Oh yeah, the specifics:  The yarn is Bettina by Adrienne Vittadini.  It is viscose, nylon and linen.  I had seen several of the solid color Vittadini yarns and was considering them, although the color selection is never my favorite in this line of yarns, but I had not yet seen this yarn.  I also bought the Vittadini spring book.  There are a couple of sweaters that attracted me and I was considering the book anyway.  It has a pattern for a shell using Bettina and I like the basic shape so I decided to make it; this saves me having to adapt some other pattern to this yarn. 

Easy is sometimes very good.

Love and Knitting

Travelling has been good for Aiko as I finished knitting last night.  By the time I landed in Newburgh Tuesday I was only about 12 rows shy of finishing, but with unpacking and all the chaos at home after an almost three week absense (two trips), I did not manage to pick it up again until yesterday evening.   

Here are the two sleeves:

The light is not great for photographs and I can't go outside as it rains and rains..I am apparently supposed to be looking forward to a yucky sucky rainy week and weekend and it is COLD!! Maybe I better finish a nice warm wool sweater... who would have thought I would be craving cashmere for Memorial Day?

Last night was Tabasco's official LOVE ME night as she crawled up in my lap and clung to me with very sharp claws if I shifted position or God forbid, dared to get up and move around.  Who can blame her?  First I left for 10 days -- well, granted her dad was home, but he's not the same, and then after only two days back, we both left for another four days.  The poor beast was affection-starved!!

Here she is rolling around at my feet after I finished Aiko and thought I would work on the last sleeve of Wine&Roses for a while:

Wine and Roses was not a successful project as it seemed to  compete with catly attention demands too much.   Since I had to keep searching for a new ball of yarn every row I kept shifting around and fidgeting.  I now have numerous scratches and puncture wounds in my legs to pay for my crimes.  I eventually had to give up and let my hands be content stroking downy soft cat fur.  First things first, after all.

I left Wine&Roses on the blocking board when I left and shamefacedly I must admit it is still there waiting with baited breath for the long promised sleeves.  Well I have 26 rows left and hope to finish them today or tomorrow, maybe Saturday as I have to go into NYC tomorrow evening.  I will not take this project on the train.  I can just see myself rumaging through my bag of multiple yarns searching for the next color, balls of yarn falling out of the bag and off my lap and rolling around on the train between everyone's legs.  Its not goint to happen!  As soon as I can get it done, however, I can block Aiko and get both projects FINISHED.

Purling

Yesterday was travel day and was primarily spent in airports and on airplanes.  I had my knitting, the first sleeve for Aiko, and my book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. 

Here is the first sleeve, so far, extending about 1 1/2 inches above the elbow:

As I would get tired of knitting, and k2, p2 rib can be kind of mind numbing at times, I would turn to my book, which is quite interesting and I would get all wrapped up in reading, but then I would find that I needed to put the book down and let my mind do a little purling of its own, so I would pick up the needles again and knit and purl, and contemplate the ways in which the world is changing and what it all might mean.

In many ways the book is nothing new except that the world has moved ahead, while I too, to quote Mr. Friedman, was sleeping; kind of embarrassing for a retired programmer and engineer.  While I was caught up in all the many things that life has been throwing my way the last few years, the world has made a giant leap forward.  Of course I was getting a glimmer of this as I have been recently exploring the web more and looking at blogs and websites and all the wonderful tools and languages out there, thinking I need to play with XML and so many new things. 

Friedman is causing me to think about things in different ways and this is quite thrilling.  He is also bringing up many worries that have been floating around the back of my mind for some years.  Even when I was in grad school in the late 80's, engineering and math undergraduates were dropping off, and although the number of students pursuing advanced degrees did not peak until the early 90's, even when I was in school far more of those students were immigrants or children of immigrants than american-bred.  This flatter, open communication world will have totally different boundaries and this presents great opportunities, but I wonder if enough Americans will be able to grab hold and rise to the top.   If Friedman is right, the new world will be one in which we will constantly have to be learning and improving and striving to be the best. 

As my darling husband says, it is the ones with a "fire in their belly" that will be the winners.  I worry that the ones that don't have the knowledge and the education and the ambition will fall by the wayside unless we as a society make great changes to see that this does not happen.  The answer may not be in protecting low level manufacturing jobs because those are not the jobs of the future or of success, but we have a long way to go before we can prepare large sections of our populations to be the innovators and to find the niche where they too can succeed in a world that changing much too fast.

So all these thoughts kept me knitting.  As I knit it struck me with no little irony that knitting is a low level job that can really be done by anyone who practices, or by a machine even.  Yet even though I love technology, I love the act of creating something that knitting provides.  As we become efficient and more effective, and in many ways removed from the personal, some part of us may yearn for some basic human handicraft, something that puts us more in touch with at least a dream of simpler times.  As we all know, simpler times weren't really simpler and life was much harder.  We have a long way to go to decide what is valuable in this life and what is not, and we have a lot of work to do to insure that a valuable life is open to everyone.

One nice thing about coming home though is that spring is really here.  When I left the ground was still mostly bare and not many flowers were out.  Now everything is green and flowers are blooming everywhere, including these lovely primulas:

Doesn't that inspire a happy thought?  Even out of barren dirt, something wonderful always blooms.

Not Much Knitting..

I am still in San Francisco and not much knitting is happening here.  However the sewing week ended last night and I thought I perhaps had more patience and down-time to connect and update you on my progress.  The high-speed internet connection is still not working in my room but I perhaps have more time now that I am not rushing up to either the sewing room or to dinner, and thought I could work through the more tedious telephone connection.

Here are photos of Wine and Roses, which is languishing at home on the blocking board, waiting my return:

As you can see, there are many ends to weave in.

I have been thinking about the ends and realize that weaving in will be somewhat tricky because of the blend of fibers, some of which are quite ravelly and will have to be knotted.  There might be some way to knot them together and then deal with the ends in a decorative but still flat and neat way.  More research will be required when I get home.

I have made a little progress on Aiko, about 3 1/2 inches up into the sleeve shaping.  I might finish the front before flying on Tuesday, when I will start the sleeves.

Most of this was knitted yesterday in the van while Dan drove  our sewing group around the bay area for some fabric shopping. 

Tomorrow I will go to ArtFibers and I will update you on all the wonderful details.

In San Francisco

Last week was a really stressful week, with computer problems in the office requiring me to work late every night.  Needless to say a lot of knitting was not accomplished.  I did finally block the body of the Wine and Roses cardigan, although I only knit about 4 more rows on the last sleeve.  I was too tired in the evening to even manage selecting the next yarn in the sequence. 

I did work on Aiko on my flight to San Francisco yesterday and had an interesting time frogging  a section on the little turn down tray table they provide on the plane.  The front is completed up to the beginning of the armhole shaping so it is progressing nicely.

My San Francisco trip is really a sewing week and I don't usually get a lot of knitting done while I am here, but I do hope to post a picture of the progress on Aiko soon.  Otherwise, the only knitting related activity for this trip will probably be a visit to Art Fibers, a really neat yarn shop a few blocks down Sutter from here.  They have a really unusual yarn selection and I will keep you informed if I pick up anything really interesting.  Hopefully by that time the ethernet connection in my hotel room will be working and I can post pictures.

Bird of Paradise

Kingfisher is done!!

It is really a simple sweater, knit side to side with short rows at the bottom to form the godets.  The pattern called for the same short-row shaping at the sleeves but I left it out as I have a very annoying habit of dragging sleeves through just about everything.  I like these straight sleeves much better. 

The little bit of flare and curve at the hip caused by the short rows adds a very feminine bit of flare to the top.  Putting it on brought on a definite "I feel pretty" moment and that, combined with the belated appearance of a little sunshine, inspired a little spring dance.

I pulled out the cardigan knit from pink and wine leftover and miscellaneous yarns, which I had dubbed "Wine and Roses"

and worked on the last sleeve.  I had just started the sleeve when I put it aside; I had knit about 15 rows.  I finished the first stripe sequence repeat, now about 35 rows including the cuff, and the sleeve is a little over 1/3 done, the photo is misleading because I really zoomed in to see as much of the yarns as possible.

It really doesn't take a long time to knit as the guage is fairly big, but changing yarns every row slows the process down, not nearly as much in the knitting as it will in the finishing.  I hope to get the body on the blocking board today, so I can finish the second sleeve and get the sleeves on the board before I leave for San Francisco on Saturday. 

I really don't imagine that I will be wearing this before fall, so there is no real rush to finish other than to get it out of the way.  Finishing will take some time as some of the novelty yarns tend to ravel and care will need to be taken with ends and finishing.  Luckily there is a lot of wool to help hide the more "high maintenance" yarns.