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Dear Ellen,

Sunday afternoon or evening is often when I carve out the time to post about activities in general and activities in knitting.  The act of slowing myself down enough to capture some thoughts for public consumption is calming even when I feel there are more urgent items on my to-do list.  More and more I feel like it is my chance to take a deep cleansing breath before I dive into the insanity to come.  And then the act of knitting (which I do try to squeeze in daily, even if only for 10 minutes) is my lifeline that will pull me back to the surface in time to get another breath.  I’m so glad we started this blog!  And believe it or not, our two year anniversary is in just over a month!  I’m going to try to read some of our old posts to get some perspective on from whence we’ve come….and maybe thoughts on to where we might decide to head next.

This last week really was one of insanity.  The new boss is finally on board and he seems to have the notion that he’s in charge.  I’ll have to disabuse him of that quickly.  I’ll talk to his wife.  He’s a pretty good guy, but the “new boss” period is always stressful.  It was also stressful to frog all of what I had accomplished on the right front of my Einstein jacket (A Stitch Away from Genius).  I have screwed around with the pattern due to the gauge yielded by the bulky alpaca I’m using and I decided I got it wrong after about 3 inches.  Here you see a new scant inch where I modified…and added mini box pleats to account for the fact that I’m severely pear shaped.  Now I think I want to frog this and do it once again adding a few more pleats or to change them to distributed decreases.  I don’t know I’ll leave it aside for a few days.

Saturday we drove to Quarryville (where our property is) and bought some stuff from an Amish guy named John.  He and his brother do custom furniture and sheds and we bought both.  We had decided that for our anniversary we would get furniture for the deck here…a bistro set since a full patio set would be too large.  Looking at John’s stuff I got the notion that we might just enjoy the beautiful spruce glider chairs better…most excellent lumbar support.  Dale fairly quickly agreed and we ordered two and an end table.  We had gone in to order a shed for the property.  We did get that too…a very nice one with room for storing the tools we’ll be using to clear paths and landscaping and to keep camping gear between visits.  I’m looking forward to our first night on the property…but not till we acquire some suitable gear!  We did some work too…cleared the 12X12 foot area (of course cleared more than that) at the edge of the woods on which the shed will sit.  And we cleared debris and brush from where the entrance had become overgrown and obstructed over time.  I felt we had very much earned our stop at Maplehof’s Dairy where we had sinfully delicious ice cream cones.  On the way up I studied.  On the way back I got the second of the Desert Skies Socks started.

Today I woke early, managed to find a means to fall back to sleep and then wasn’t out of bed till 11:30AM.  Even so, I am ready to go to bed now.  I did do some more work in my office — arranging, unpacking and doing homework.  It was a very good weekend and with this deep breath, I feel like I can face the coming week.

Love, Jan

Dear Ellen,

You knew from the title that this post would contain some very bad judgment.  It does.

For some reason I decided that working on Fichu, Gesundheit — the next Vanessa project — would be  a great way to fill time while I was nursing a bad shoulder spasm that started last Thursday.  Yes, I was taking flexeril(tm) and trying to keep my left arm immobilized, but that didn’t stop me.  As the photo shows, I did finally make some progress, but it was only after roughly 8 hours or knitting, tinking, frogging and more knitting.  When I finally realized I was misinterpreting a chart symbol it went a lot better.  MAYBE this could have worked had I already done a few repeats of the pattern, but I had only done the garter stitch neckband and hadn’t even studied the chart.  Oh, wait…studying the chart.  I suppose that might have helped too.  I can report that today the shoulder is much better and when I finish here, I plan on doing another repeat…with a clear head.  I hope the foregoing builds your sense of confidence in our senior military leaders.

A very sensible person would have picked one of the other projects already underway.  For instance, I’ve only gotten about 4 inches into the skirt part of A Stitch Away From Genius — hours to go before I’d have to think of anything other than remembering to slip the first stitch of each row.  And the Robin’s Egg Vest is at point where I can do it pretty much without thinking.  Cinnamon Tee takes some counting to keep track of when to decrease for the fitting, but other than that it’s stockinette…so with so many better options, what the heck was I thinking?  I guess I just needed a challenge…and I had not a bit of sense in between my ears at the time.

And evidently, I’m not done with the startitis.  I’ve got this lovely Alpaca from gentle Narcissus of Table Rock Llamas — she’s not pictured on their web site as she’s not for sale.  With it I intend to make Not So Naive with the “Ingenue” pattern in Custom Knits.  It is a great boatneck sweater with a quasi-standup “portrait” collar.  And I’ve committed to make one of two pair of booties for one of the young Lieutenants who has done so much for women in the Navy (including getting the senior Navy women organized on Facebook!) and is now expecting twins.  I’m calling them Hopeful Booties as her first name is Hope. I’m using the Baby Life Ring Booties Pattern from Cat Bordhi’s Magical Knitting site.

Perhaps the muscle relaxers are still affecting me…I do have to be ready to move in less than a month and I’m going to start more projects?!

With that thought in mind, I think I’ll go knit.

Love, Jan

P.S. I was very busy the last two weeks of silence…several trips and mandatory fun.  No need to bore you with it!

Dear Ellen,

It was good talking to you today. I do think we need to plan our mini-break in celebration of the upcoming milestone. Something involving fiber would be fun, but any time we get to hang out will be fine with me. Let’s see what we can come up with.

Remember my asking about the curliness of your hair when you were in DC for Marie’s wedding? Well, I got mine trimmed the other day and the stylist asked if she could have some fun and “encourage my curls” during the blow-dry. I gave her the go ahead and here’s the result. I think it’s pretty cute…and can do it myself, but my usual habit is to pull it back or put it up when I get out of the shower — this will be fun for special events though.

What do you think this is?

Hint: it’s not a Baby Surprise.

See if you can work it out and I’ll tell you at the end of the post.

I finished the socks I worked on during part of our trip west. I’m quite pleased with them now, but they really drove me crazy during the process of completing them. I finished the first one and bound it off and then decided It was too short. Here’s the saga — Okay, the second sock is already on the needles, so I’ll knit it to a better length and then go back and add on to the other. The ends aren’t yet woven in, so at least it won’t be too hard to frog back to the last row of knitting. Okay, this length is much better. Now to try it on…What? Crap, what was I thinking…this is a standard-bind off instead of an elastic bind-off. I’m going to have to redo it…but not tonight. Okay, it’s a new day, let’s get that bind-off fixed. Gee, in my hand this bind-off is fairly elastic, strange that it was so unforgiving on my foot. Well, it’s redone now, let’s try it on. What the @#%$??!! Double crap! I just redid the bind-off on the sock that was too short! Good grief, that sock will end up with three bind-offs by the time I’m done with it. Okay, settle down and pick up the LONG SOCK. This is definitely it…redo the bind-off and now it fits great. Now, pick up the SHORT SOCK and frog back to the meandering rib pattern and add four more repeats and then bind-off using an elastic bind-off. Am I out of yarn already? Oh brother! I picked up the wrong leftover yarn to add on to the sock…now I have to add yet another length of yarn. Back to business…and FINALLY finished. And they do fit perfectly, so in the end it’s worth it. I like the pattern stitch. I made it up on the fly when I decided I didn’t want just plain ribbing to the top…I’m sure it’s in some stitch dictionary, but I’m calling it meandering rib and think it looks like a nuance of mock-cable.

Figure it out yet? Here’s another picture in process to help you guess. At this point it should be fairly easy. And here’s a shot of how the dogs have stolen it for a bit of a romp. (I confess, this shot is only included because I love the look of Ruby galloping.)

We had a really great morning yesterday. We got up pretty early for a Saturday and headed over to Barr Mountain. The dogs came along for what turned out to be a three hour tour hike. (Did you hear the theme song to Gilligan’s Island as you read that?) It was GORGEOUS. We started out with Max christening the trail head — his own form of adoption. (BTW, did you know that this area has the highest population of Wiccans in the country?) Every time you turned a switchback you saw another view of the foothills leading up to the Rocky Mountains. And the trail was bordered by some very impressive boulders. We didn’t see a lot of wildlife (after all there we’re many hikers), but I did spot this hummingbird. It kindly lit on this tree to let me take its picture. After we had been on the trail for a while (passing and being passed by many other hikers, some of whom had their dogs off leash), we decided to try Ruby off leash. We thought she’d be unlikely to charge off without us as she was sticking pretty close. She did great…seemed to love the extra bit of liberation and did stay with us very nicely. She even followed instruction when we would call her to the side to let a runner go by. (Comment on the runners — they’re insane. The trail was very rocky in places, lots of “ankle grabbers,” and in places quite steep. The one guy on the mountain bike…forget it!) Based on her fine performance we let Max off lead as well and he did nearly as well as Ruby. We stopped for water and to climb some rocks…the dogs thought they were king and queen of the world! When we got back to the car we were all pretty well bushed, but Dale and I didn’t have the option of just crashing like someone else.

Yes, you’re right! It is a doggy bone! It has the sound device from one of the dog’s favorite toys inside…they loved that toy so much that when it totally fell apart I decided I’d have to knit a replacement of some sort. I used nylon cording to try to make it as non-destructible as possible and I modified a commercial pattern for a felted dog bone. Ruby is quite appreciative, but she has a bit of trouble picking it up. Max carries around quite nicely, but wouldn’t let me get a picture of him doing so.

Enough for now back to working on my first Baby Surprise.

Love, Jan

Dear Ellen,

“Rabbit, rabbit.” For 28 years I have been saying “rabbit, rabbit” on the first day of each month. One of my buddies at my first duty station maintained that it brought you good luck for the rest of the month. I have no idea the logic behind it, but I suspect you are actually supposed to be saying, “rabbi, rabbi” — at least that would have some sort of connection to a prayer of some sort. Regardless, I like the idea of invoking the favors of small, furry creatures so I’ll stick with the rabbits.

Here are some more furry creatures — Ronnie and Possum are Marie and Heidi’s relatively new kittens. They get along famously with their older cat, Monkey, who is both camera shy (and therefore not pictured here) and looks remarkably like a younger Black Pearl. (Big sigh!) Ronnie has enormous paws for a kitten and Possum purrs at about 150 decibels…and he does it non-stop.

And enjoying the springtime beauty of our backyard, here is Max just standing around and Ruby amidst the roses. I have to admit the yard is really nice right now…and the roses are gorgeous and fragrant.

As for me, I am trying to get over yet another nasty cold/sinus infection. Like the last one, this one is accompanied by a really sore throat — my tonsil “stumps” are enlarged, red and angry and it is very painful to swallow. (Possibly TMI…sorry!) I sure am glad there are no tonsils left in there…I can only imagine what that would be like! I imagine the prudent thing would be to go get a throat culture tomorrow. Even more prudent would be to slow down and not travel so much. I don’t foresee that happening any time soon.

I haven’t knit very much in the last few days. I’m not sure if that’s because of the malaise I feel from the cold or if it’s because I’ve discovered that the “sale” yarn I snatched up for use on knitting charity caps for kids is not the same dye lot. I’m trying to figure out how to make this a design feature on a cap that is 90% complete at the point where I have to add the new yarn (which was also the point at which I discovered the issue.) I’m thinking that since the remaining portion is the brim, it would be okay for that to be a different hue and that I could also add either a pon-pom or some kind of duplicate stitching/embroidery to blend the shade difference (which is really quite significant now that I have the yarn out of the unlabeled packaging.) I think I’ll go to bed early and sleep on it.

Love, Jan

Hi Ellen!

Lo this many a year I have resisted wet blocking. Too much hassle when you can just steam block, right? How can I afford the time to let it dry? Surely it doesn’t make that much difference, does it? Okay, I am so very wrong.

I realized I had no choice but to wet block Marie’s shawl…it had to be done that way. And it wasn’t so terribly traumatic. I also was a little surprised (naively so, I suppose) at how much it stretched out. With this in mind I considered that short entrelac scarf that I finished last week. It needed to be longer. So, it sat on the edge of the bathtub till yesterday just waiting for me to see if the stretch factor only applied to lace, or if it would also work on stockinette — and yesterday, it took a soak and then a stretch. Now it is of completely satisfactory length and I am quite pleased. The entrelac blocks are a bit more diamond-like, but with a nice aesthetic.

When I saw how much the wet blocking did for the length of the scarf, I pulled out the “Sally’s Favorite Sweater” that I knit over the summer that had somehow ended up wider than it was long. (As it was supposed to be a tunic, this was not good.) I broke the side stitching to allow the pieces to stretch and gave it a soak too. Amazing…it is now longer than wide and may possibly be wearable! The sleeves look kind of skinny, but I don’t like wide sleeves, so I think I’m good with them.  Once it’s dry, I’ll try it on again and let you know.

I’ve started a new scarf based on the Lily of the Valley stitch pattern. Frankly, it’s kicking my butt a bit. I need to chart the lace pattern as the pattern book I have has it written out and I keep losing my place. Also, I’m using a Donegal yarn that is surprisingly unpleasant to knit. Little give and lots of scratch. I had planned this for the Red Scarf Project in the first place. I won’t miss it when I give it away.

Love, Jan