twinset.us

Dear Ellen,

This week has been a fairly good one for knuckling down and taking care of many loose ends…some knitting and some metaphorical.  I moved along a few projects at work, got my paperwork straightened out for my next class, caught up on some of my office keeping at home and pulled two knitting projects out that had gotten pushed to the side.One of those two is the Robin’s Egg vest for mom.  It’s intended to be her Christmas present, so it was about time I got back to it.  It had been sitting to the side since our move east.  On that drive I had worked out how I wanted to do the decreases and shaping for the right front…no, I didn’t take any notes.  Why bother?  I was going to do the other side right away and I could surely remember how I did it for a few days, right?  Yeah, you know what happened.  And the greater the temporal separation the less inclined I was to pull it out and figure out what the heck I’d done so that the sides could match.  I finally pulled it out and took it with us yesterday.

We went to Fair Winds where the dogs got to run and play, Dale stacked piles of rocks and cleared brush, and I knit and frogged till I figured out what I had done and repeated it in mirror-image for the other side.  Now I’ve got the back to do, but as it doesn’t have to match anything, it should go quickly.

The other hadn’t been sitting very long, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, so it was a great risk for going dormant.  And since it’s your test knit for the Gansey hat, I didn’t want to do that.  I pulled it out this morning and sat out in the lovely fresh air on our deck and decided A) I’m going to finish in this colorway and B) I’m going to do a simple arrowhead pattern in the back “customization” area.  I had been trying to be too clever and chart our our logo, but the graph paper wasn’t knitter’s graph paper (so distortion of pattern when knit ensues) and your point about the colorway not allowing clear distinction of the pattern made it untenable.  My choices were to totally frog and redo in a “more appropriate” yarn — which would also require redesigning to eliminate the distortion of the logo — or to forego the logo and stick with my yarn choice.  I decided that I really like the muted, subtle effect that the colorway was giving to the rest of the hat.  (Remember, I’m the one who did a whole cloth quilting pattern on a marbled gray fabric and loved it, despite the fact that you have to slow down and inspect the quilt to make out the stitchwork?  Same here…you have to slow down to appreciate this and I like it.)  I ripped out the whole section and reworked what I had done.  I referred to it as an arrowhead, but I was really thinking about the wild geese I had seen and HEARD flying over head while at Fair Winds yesterday.  And, to be clear, that’s the front of the hat in the picture above, not the reworked back.

I’ve also knit up my basic toe-up baby booty pattern in a pink worsted with a nice ruffled effect at the cuff edge.  I’m calling them carnation booties because it looks kind of like a carnation if you gather the two together around the cuffs.  I’ve been asked by a Raveler to make my Cutie Patootie Booties pattern available and I will…along with these and some other variants.  I’m thinking of offering a combo that includes these and maybe a few other cuff options.  “Baby’s First Cashmere” is the name for the toe-up variant of the Cutie Patooties (which were cuff down).  Could be part of the Snack Knitting book…never heard back from you on that idea by the way.

I’m going to enjoy the rest of a very quiet Sunday.  Dale is out sailing and the doggies are exhausted from running around the property.

Love, Jan