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Dear Ellen,

Thanks for pointing me at the Knitmore Girls for their preemie/newborn hat design contest.  I was in dire need of snack knitting with a challenge, so the design contest was a perfect context.  I poured through the Japanese stitch pattern book, 250 Couture Knit Stitch Patterns by Hitomi Shida and found a few intriguing patterns that worked out to make what I think is a pretty cute little pattern.  I knit one up in leftover elann Superwash Chunky and one in some leftover Tempted Hand Painted Good Grrl.  Since I made them with scraps I’m calling them my Scrap Babies. The two different yarn weights yielded two different sizes — one that will fit a newborn and one that will fit a preemie.  I stayed up late last night to get the pattern finished and entered.  Then I saw your note about how they had extended the deadline.  I’ve downloaded the podcasts, but I guess I should start listening to it if I want this kind of information while it actually helps.

I did some other snack knitting too.  Katie’s Sparkly Scarf is finished and I hope to get my act together enough to put it in the mail by the weekend.  This was a really fun knit.  I ran out of yarn too quickly, but there was  enough for the purpose.  This is one of those scarves that you start at the center back with a provisional cast on and knit to one end and then go back to the center and knit out to the other end so that you can have nicely matching ends, a good design feature for this pattern.  Instead of doing a provisional cast on I did Jenny’s Magic cast on and just put one half on a stitch holder and then knit the first half from the other side.  Then I moved the reserved stitches back to a needle and did the other half.  It looked a little short when I was done, but thanks to the miracle of wet blocking (during which it reminded me of a planaria) it grew to a nice length for an accessory scarf.  I wouldn’t count on it much for actual warmth.

It’s Single Skein September — I haven’t started anything yet, but have ideas for socks (thanks to all the great patterns from Hitomi) and I have at least 2 pairs of mitts for Christmas presents.  I’ll get moving on those tomorrow.

Love, Jan

…it must be state fair food.

Dear Jan,

It’s hard to believe any nutrition can be found in such an offering, but, you know, I think falafel-on-a-stick just might do it.  At any rate, it was darned tasty - you could discern actual chickpeas and the herbs were spot on.

That was lunch today as I made a visit to the state fair.  I saw some animals, watched the draft horse show, did my annual wondering as to whether making our dairy princesses sit in a refrigerated glass booth while their likenesses are carved in butter in front of crowds of onlookers will have a chilling effect on their mental health, and generally had a pleasant day.

The Fine Arts building was fine.  An example of  life depicting art depicting life, a portrait of a sheep, created by felting white sheep’s wool onto a background of black wool, won an award.  The series of photos of squashes on vacation did not, but I enjoyed them anyway.

I spent much of the day examining the knitting entries.  I was happy with my outcome, thrilled, actually, to win 1st place and a sweepstakes award for my gloves (Paula, that was great yarn you gave me last holiday!) and satisfied to win a 4th for my gansey.

Everything is bigger than life at the state fair, apparently even Dead Fish Hats.

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There was plenty of Bohus sighting.  A Large Lace Collar knit by Shelly Monitor won big.  What a beauty!

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But what’s this?  According to the records, my Wild Apple cap had not won anything and yet here it is with a blue and a special award!!!  Dang, it sure looks better than I remembered.   Um, too good?

Yep.  Over in the back of the room was my actual cap, knit at a larger gauge than the one that did all the winning and justifiably not sporting any ribbons.   But a knitter can dream, can’t they?

I knit a bit on the bus on the little baby hat I’m designing for the Knitmore Girls contest, and knit some more on it when I got home.  I’m maybe 50% of the way there, so finishing and writing the pattern by August 31 should be doable, shouldn’t it?  (And casting on such a small project doesn’t really count as startitis, right?)

More to come on that later.  Right now I’m busy dreaming about entries for next year’s fair.

Love,

Ellen

Dear Jan,

Please forgive my vulgar post title, but really, this weekend was rather nuts with fleeces and batts and, well, just look at what I had at the end of Sunday morning…

Yes.  The patio table is covered with literally pounds of batting, all the result of my borrowing Steven’s drum carder for the weekend.  My arm was aching from all the cranking, and it was with no small amount of relief that I returned the carder to StevenBe on Sunday and started spinning the results of my labors.

For those of you who have no interest in the fleece processing process, just skip to the gratuitous kitten picture at the end of the post.

This process started months ago when I bought the fleeces and then washed them (without agitation or rinsing!) in my washing machine.  The results were kind of condensed clumps of fleece - not felted, but definitely not fluffy.  I used my fingers (and later my hand cards) to tease these clumps open a bit and feed them into the carder.

Several handfuls later, I removed the batt by sliding the doffer under the web, pulling rather than cutting the continuous piece apart.

I split it lengthwise and then spread it widthwise and fed it back through the carder once more.  This time I let the carder really stretch the fibers as they fed in.  The result - an airy poof of loveliness.

Repeat roughly 70-80 times and you have an idea of how my weekend went.  I processed my Targhee cross fleece (shown above) and my Shetland.  The former is great.  The latter is simply wonderful.  The darker batts are from the fleece from the belly and legs - coarser and a bit hairy, but still wonderful.  The grey batts?  Like buttah.  Funny to think they started out looking like little lumps of something you wouldn’t want to step in.  The transformation was enchanting, like blocking lace.

Ah, my favorite colors really are grey and black.

Love,

Ellen

P.S. Knitting happened over the weekend, too, and a little spinning.  Maybe that will make it to a midweek post, but right now I have to do a little of the work that pays for my hobbies.

Dear Ellen,

I realize that this post must have had you immediately wondering why I would make mention of my luncheon habits , but actually I was referring to the tour I took last Friday of the mighty warship USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719).  PROVIDENCE is, of course, Allen’s submarine.  I flew up to the city of Providence* on Thursday evening and on Friday did some business at the Submarine Base and then Allen gave me a tour of his boat. **  I was so proud — mostly of the fact that I didn’t fall down any ladders, but also of how well Allen is obviously doing on board as the Supply Officer.  We spent the rest of the evening walking around New London, having pizza and laughing at funny web sites like Regretsy, The Man Repeller and Texts from Last Night.  Ah, a great mother/son evening.*

The next morning I drove him up to his mechanic’s house in Hebron so he could pick up his 1973 Innocenti Mini who had been in getting a new fuel pump.  We took pictures with the mechanic’s red minis (larger and smaller!) and then headed out for breakfast and to see me off at the airport.  A very nice visit.

While on the flight I started a new scarf.  You may recall that I made a Sparkly Scarf for Ava several months ago — and mom Katie made the comment that she so wanted one too.  She’s not going to get an identical one, but I’m taking the leftover yarn and making her a Lamina with the same beads. It may have to be a pattern repeat or two shorter than the pattern calls for, but it will be plenty long enough to be a nice accessory. And with all the sweaters I’ve been working on, I need some snack knitting!  I’m calling it Katie’s Sparkly Scarf because I am so creative.  If you look at the cast on edge, you’ll be able to see a bunch of live stitches on a stitch holder.  The instructions called for a provisional cast on so you can knit half in one direction and then return to knit the other direction (after picking up live stitches and unraveling your provisional cast on).  I figured, why not just use a toe-up sock cast on and put one half the stitches on a holder so you don’t have to screw around with any of the silliness of the waste yarn and all.  I expect it will work out perfectly.  Stay tuned.

I’ve decided to go ahead and post pictures of the sweater I made last year for Allen.  (Remember, I was going to submit the pattern for publications, so couldn’t put pictures up?)  Well, I never submitted it as I decided it needed some tweaking before I would do so. Plus I’m going to knit something similar for Dale, so will use his as the submission…someday.  It will be different enough to qualify as a different pattern.  I learned a lot from making this one for Allen and am quite pleased with most of it, especially things like the applied I-cored neckline, but there are other areas that need adjustment (like shoulder width, scye depths, that kind of stuff).

Today has been a quiet day.  I took the dogs for a nice long walk and enjoyed just being.  We’ve got wild grapes all over everything along the trail that the dogs and I follow.  Some honeysuckle and wild snapdragons too, but mostly wild grapes.  The dogs pretty much ignored the flora and me.  They were far too involved in conversations of their own.  I love how much they like each other.  I could have used more nap time, but the day was pretty good regardless.

Love, Jan

* Sorry for all the bizarre new spam we are sure to get.
** Notice we fully capitalize the names of our naval vessels like PROVIDENCE (in order to make them appear even more powerful).  We do not fully capitalize the names of cities like Providence.  It’s a Navy thing.
**For you landlubbers — NO, not you laplanders! — we call submarines “boats” and we call ships…well, “ships.”

…because it is.

Dear Jan,

Check out the most recent Cat and Girl.  This one hit me right in the sternum and made me laugh out loud.  I think many knitters will have the same reaction.

I love that Cat is happy to hold Girl’s yarn - while she knits, not while she is rolling a ball.  That is true friendship.  And must indicate that Cat is not a knitter, or he’d never give up all that time from his own needles.

Happy Friday,

Ellen