Rhinebeck Vest

If you are a woman who's ever been pregnant before, you'll probably disagree with what I have to say next and possibly hate me for it, but:  the worst thing about being pregnant is that none of my clothes fit me.

To clarify, I've been unbelievably lucky so far in terms of side effects:  no morning sickness for me.  In fact, I've been hungry all the time since day one.  Oh, and uncomfortably warm too.  Thank god it's fall.

So, rather than making a Rhinebeck sweater this year, I went with a Rhinebeck vest.  I wanted something that I could wear with a 30-week-pregnant belly, but that I could also wear when I revert to a non-pregnant state.  I just hate the idea of buying or making clothes that I can only wear for a few months.  (So, mostly, I don't.  I have one pair of maternity jeans (pictured below, natch) that I wear everyday, one bra that fits, and six t-shirts from target.)

Oh, right, the vest.  I wanted the sporty look of a down-stuffed nylon vest, without the bulkiness (or the zippers that no longer close over my belly.  grumble grumble.)  So I went with simple cables on the front and the back, and ribbing on the sides; the cable twists are positioned to create some simple diagonal vees.  Another advantage of this approach to cabling is that I never had to count rows to figure out when to twist; every RS row, I twisted in the column next to my previous twist.  

To make the vest a little more modern, I added a tall, double-thick collar which is a different color on the inside.  (DH thinks "handknit sweatervest" is practically the definition of old-person clothing.  Then again, he wears socks with sandals.)  The yarn is Quince&co Osprey in Peacoat and Bird's Egg.  Aren't the colors fabulous?  I think of navy blue as an incredibly boring color, but I just love how saturated Peacoat is.  Osprey is a delicious aran-weight yarn which comes in fabulous colors and is both made locally (in Maine) and surprisingly affordable.  I loved working with it and it knit up super quickly on size ten needles.  I'm a little worried about pilling at this gauge, but at this point, there's nothing to do but wait and see!

Clay Crochet and a Yarn Frog

On Saturday my friend Katy and I were wandering around Philadelphia after a delicious visit to the Reading Terminal Market and a horrifying visit to the Mütter Museum, and we stumbled upon Philadelphia's Magic Gardens. I was familiar with the artist responsible for this place, Isaiah Zagar, because I've seen the documentary about him, In a Dream. I have no idea when, where, or why I saw this documentary, which is perhaps a testament to both my shoddy memory of media I consume and the sheer volume of documentaries I've watched. It was a very fun place to walk around. It reminded me a little of the City Museum in St. Louis in its wacky artist's vision sort of vibe, although I have to say the City Museum wins out for its dangerous jungle gym appeal.

Magic Gardens is beautiful, though. Lots of passageways to explore.




More visual stimuli than anyone can possibly know what to do with.






Now, you might have spied in the last photo the thing that really caught my eye here. Zagar uses a technique where he presses crocheted and other lace items into the clay tiles he makes. They are so beautiful and I just started taking photos of them everywhere.







Given just how many of these tiles you can find in Magic Gardens, Zagar is clearly fascinated by the textures of lace fabrics. There's a positive and negative space thing going on in the tiles that seems to play on what's special about lace fabrics. Lace fabric is doubly interesting for what it can do with light--diffuse it, dapple it, etc, which I guess makes it a little more magical to me than these tiles. Still, I love these tiles and bought one in the gift shop!

My other fun find this weekend was at the NY Aquarium in Coney Island, NY. I was there running a 5K charity race for turtle conservation (appropriate, given my running speed). We toured the aquarium after the race and I met this adorable frog who wanted to pose with my on-the-go sock in progress.



So cute. The next post you'll be seeing from me will no doubt be a Rhinebeck recap. Is this the year I finally buy a fleece? What other treasures will come home with me? How many sheep will I pet and how much maple cotton candy will I eat? Stay tuned.

Surprises

I'm a little jealous of my cobloggers' spinning abilities for one particular reason:  color control.  I love yarns with long, subtle color-changes (well, who doesn't?) and the sight of all the different varieties of hand-dyed roving at fiber festivals is almost enough to make me want to learn a new hobby.  And then I remind myself that I already have 8 different knitting projects that I consider to be works in progress ...

And speaking of works in progress, I recently decided that I needed to make a baby surprise jacket.  Out of yarn that went through a long color change between green, teal, blue, purple and fuscia.  It had to be exactly those colors in exactly that order.  I don't know why my mind produces such unreasonably specific demands.  Can you imagine me calling around to local yarn stores, asking if they have a fingering-weight or sport-weight yarn in exactly those colors?  And it should be mostly wool too?

In this kind of situation, one has little choice but to take matters into one's own hands.  Fortunately for me, I had already planned a trip to see my friend and fellow mathematical knitter sarah-marie, recent proud owner of a sock-knitting machine and kool-aid/easter-egg-dying-enthusiast.  Unfortunately for me, she laughed at my incredibly specific color demands.

But the internet didn't!  The internet said I could have whatever freaking colors I wanted, if I bought Wilton's food dye in the right shades.  (This knitty tutorial was a great resource.)  I won't bore you with the color mixing details (they're on my ravelry stash page if you want 'em); but I mixed 'em up and mashed them into my sock blank and nuked them in sarah-marie's microwave until it looked like the colors had set; and the result was everything I'd hoped for, with a cherry on top.

(What I really love about this shot is how you can see that my bra and tank top exactly match two of the colors I'm dying with.)

From there, it was a simple matter of finding enough patience to wait for the (no longer blank) blank to dry and unraveling.  Something magical happened to the yarn at this step; the pure saturated colors that were visible on the blank became more subtle and just barely speckled when the yarn was unwound.

I can't wait to see what this yarn looks like knit up!  The BSJ it will eventually turn into is for our very own baby surprise, arriving this December if everything goes according to plan.  We don't know yet whether it's a girl or a boy -- yet another reason why this yarn is perfect.  Aren't surprises great?

Octopaws

When I'm excited about something, I can really tear through it -- I charted, swatched and knit these mittens in less than a month this last winter.   I even had a first draft of the pattern out to a test knitter less than a month after that!  And then ... then I dropped the ball.  Maybe even forgot, for a while, that there was a ball there at all.

Happily, the imminent arrival of fall got me back in gear on getting this pattern out.  After all, this is definitely a seasonal pattern!  (Didn't you know winter is octopus season?)  I posted it for sale on ravelry last week, and have really enjoyed watching people get excited about it.  It's not my first published pattern  -- that honor goes to a knitted cross-cap -- but it's my first pattern that people other than me and my test-knitters have knit.  (As far as I know.  If you're out there with a cross-cap you haven't posted on ravelry yet -- get on it!  I'd love to see it.)

A big part of what makes these mittens so great is the yarn -- Traveller from the Sanguine Gryphon.  Ask anyone I've been wine tasting with, and they'll tell you that I'm not great at the adjective game, so I'll be brief:  this yarn is sturdy and soft and warm, and it comes in awesome colors.  And!  St. Tropez, the blue colorway in these mittens, is sadly a discontinued colorway, but ... it is making a reappearance!  A limited quantity of Traveller in St. Tropez is going on sale on sale Monday September 26 at approximately 9pm EDT.  And probably selling out shortly thereafter!  Seriously, I will try to leave some for you, but I do love this color and don't know how long I'll be able to control myself.  (The orange yarn, colorway Costa Rica, is a regular color and not at risk of disappearing soon).

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack!

I highly recommend reading this blog post while listening to this song:



I'm not a Mets fan in particular (or of any team now that the Montréal Expos are defunct, to be honest), but I love fight songs, and there aren't many MLB teams that have them. Last night was the annual Stitch 'N Pitch game at CitiField, Mets v. Nationals. It wasn't the most eventful game, though it did end on an unusual uncaught third strike play. Moreover the Mets lost, but that's not really the point, right?

For one, we go for the swag. This year we got there a little late, and the only swag left were the cross stitch canvases.


I also go because it allows me to hilariously enforce the knitting rule with my husband: if we're in the knitting section at a baseball game, you must knit. He got a good three rows done, almost completely unassisted and with no refresher needed, on the garter stitch scarf he's been working on for years and years.

Oddly enough, I didn't get a good photo of him, myself, or the other knitters I was with, but this brings me to my next point: we go for the people watching!



That's a lovely granny square in progress along with some Mets-themed yarn bombing along the railings. It was all around the main entrance to the stadium and our section.



That's a team of women wearing matching shirts and all crocheting with the same pink yarn. Gotta love it!

In the great tradition of knit blogging, I had to get photos of my sock-in-progress with some of the colorful characters regulars at Mets games may have come across before: Cowbell Man and Pin Man. They both have official jerseys designating them as such, in case you were wondering.

gauge grief

You know how every pattern ever written says "use the size needles that give YOU gauge"?

Well, after two test knitters tried to make my octopus mitten pattern and told me the results were too big, I was worried that my gauge was irreproducibly small.  So I reknit the pattern myself on smaller needles.

The good news:  The pattern is still awesome!

The bad news:  Unless my hands shrink, no amount of blocking is going to make these big enough to fit me.  Fortunately I still have my original pair, so I guess these will be a christmas present to whichever of my relatives has the smallest hands.

Hexapuff Madness!

First, and for the record, I vastly prefer hexapuff over hexipuff. Hexagon, hexapod, hexadecimal, therefore hexapuff. Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

You know about the Beekeeper's Quilt, right? It's positively sweeping the (knitting) nation! I fell prey to it immediately because it's the nicest looking scrap project I've ever seen. Now I'm kicking myself that I've given so many sock scraps away over the years. Luckily I still had a goodly bag full of them.

I like this project for a bunch of reasons.

1) Puffy hexagons are cute.
2) I like that the puffy hexagons are knit in the round, no seaming.
3) Furthermore, no seaming the entire thing; it's actually tied together.
4) Since it's pieced at the end, you can make lots of puffs and then decide how the layout/color scheme will work.
5) There are lots of creative ways to puff.

Here are some of the ways I've come up with so far on how to puff, other than with sock scraps:

Handspun. This doesn't really even count as a creative way to puff per se as it's pretty obvious, but I can just sample up any little bit of fiber into a fingering weight, and make puffs from that. Lovely.



Silk Hankies. Knitting from silk hankies was certainly made popular by the Yarn Harlot, and recently I saw a very nice and informative blog post by Maia explaining the process in detail. I happen to have a bunch of silk hankies sitting around, some of which I dyed myself when Jenny Jo and I had a dyeing day at her place. I tried puffing with bamboo DPNs, and that was not happening--imagine me shaking my fist at the heavens and yelling "FRICTION!"-- so I switched over to my beloved ChiaoGoo RED lace needles, and it worked. It's a little fiddly magic looping them, because even though the join on the ChiaoGoo needles is miraculous, the silk has issues. Ideally these would be knit on very slick DPNs, which I don't think I own. It might be an excuse to invest in a set of Signature DPNs, but I'm not that crazy...yet.



Succumbing to my inability to darn.

Delusional me: La, la la, I have every intention of mending these socks. I've kept them for years. I've moved them across the country.

Tough love me: I've knit over two dozens socks while they've languished, injured. It's time to come to grips with myself. They are not going to get darned. There's still plenty of good yarn in those socks: to the puff pile!



The puff pile, by the way, she grows and grows.