Oh, go knit a turkey!

It's hard to believe that three years have passed since I knitted Terrie the Turkey from Susan B. Anderson's wonderful pattern, a free download from Spud and Chloë yarns.  If you compare the photos of my Terrie Turkey--named for a former friend--with the "Tiny Turkey" on the Spud and Chloë page, you'll see that my Terrie is rather overstuffed, or, to use the favored euphemism, "Rubensesque." There are two reasons for this.

Terrie nesting on a bed of lettuce in the greenhouse.

One is that this was the first knitted toy I'd ever made and I went somewhat overboard with the fiberfill. The other is that American poultry breeders favor big-breasted birds. Neighbors of mine in deeply rural Rhode Island raise chickens known as Cornish Crosses. These genetically-engineered blobs are so big-breasted that by six weeks of age they can barely walk because of top-heaviness. (Thus the short, unhappy life of native fowl.) So I guess that Terrie is actually somewhat realistic, insofar as a knitted turkey can be realistic. Also, I didn't knit her feet, which adds to the general impression of instability.

She will, as in past Thanksgivings, be the star of the table's centerpiece.

I'm giving you-all the heads up because there's still time before your feast to make yourself and your loved ones a knitted turkey or even a small flock. You have nothing else to do, right?

Meanwhile, there are a few things I need to get off my chest. In past Novembers, as Thanksgiving approaches, I've gone through a few songs-and-dances about my pet issues at this time of year. The first is Buy Nothing Day, aka Black Friday. I urge all of you knitters and your sisters and your cousins and your aunts to ignore the media-contrived shopping frenzy and turn this into Knit Something Day. If you send me photos of what you're knitting on November 29th, I shall post them on this blog.

I'd also like to remind those of you who live in this area of New England that the annual Buy Nothing Day Winter Coat Exchange takes place, both on the State House lawn in Providence and ancillary sites around the state and in Seekonk, MA.  Click here for addresses. If you have a warm coat to donate, drop it off. And if you need a coat, pick one up. No money is exchanged, only good will and positive energy.

So, gentle knitters, here's the drill: knit a turkey, celebrate Thanksgiving, drop off a coat to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, knit something to celebrate Knit Something Day (November 29th) while relaxing in the serenity of your unshopaholic life, and email me photos of your creations, which I shall post on the blog for general admiration. In advance I thank you ever so much for your contributions, and wish you all a lovely holiday and great leftovers, which as we all know, are the best part of the meal.

Finishing the (metaphorical) hat...

That song from Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George has been ear-worming me recently.

So many projects, so little time! Then, in the latest Vogue Knitting (Holiday 2013) there's an interview with Esteemed Knitting Crone Barbara G. Walker who admonishes everyone to finish, finish, finish before starting anything new:  "My most basic advice to other knitters is:  Always finish your project, even if you're dying to start that much more interesting new thing."

Ipse dixit.  Okay, okay.

So I started finishing stuff.  More because of my inner Sondheim than the other guru. Socks, mostly. I don't suffer from SSS (Second Sock Syndrome). I do finish a pair at a time. It's just that I usually have three or four pairs going at once. Maybe I suffer from Sixth Sock Syndrome....

This race to the finish line, it was like wrestling with inner demons. There are about six thousand new projects I want to, I want to, I want to...

But no.  I must finish what I've started, just as BGW says. And, as Sondheim envisions Seurat, there is an appealing romantic driven intensity to the artist in thrall to his creative vision/compulsion.

Behold:

Left to right, a week's finishing work:  for Caeden (18 months), for Bettina G., for moi, for Ellen (still being finished).

I'm not proud to say that pair #3, faux cables in a beautifully soft Swans Island lilac fingering weight merino took me almost two years.  The central portion of each sock was mostly done during two round-trips on Amtrak from Westerly, RI to Philadelphia, PA--ten hours per trip, in the Quiet Car where talking and all other noisy distractions are verboten.

Was it worth it? No, she said unequivocally. The socks are lovely, but confirmed to me loud and clear that I am not a detail-oriented knitter. Or, put another way, I become hysterical and unpleasant when I have to concentrate on a complicated pattern. So, never again to this pattern.

But at least I finished them....

And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat...
Finishing a hat...
Look I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.

(Stephen Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George.)

Hey, what's the Big Idea?

"Books do furnish a room."

                               --Anthony Powell

So maybe you’d like some new knitting books for the holidays, or maybe you’d like to give one to a dearly beloved knitter?  Here are three that recently crossed my desk.  They’re all clever and meritorious, and  I shall rank them in order of technical difficulty.

The easiest, technically, is The Knit Parade, by Rebecca Rymsza (Collins & Brown, 2013). This book’s Big Idea is that you can individualize a generic unisex sweater (crewneck, long sleeves) with graphic intarsia images. Stars, keys, telephone receivers, hearts pierced by lightning, leopard spots—you’ve always dreamed of a sweater decorated with these kinds of motifs, right? Each motif ties in with a pop song—that aspect is way past my realm of consciousness, but perhaps you know a teen-at-heart who’s plugged into this current, and you’re looking to knit her/him something transiently cool and tragically hip. At any rate, the patterns are clean and simple, and offer an encouraging introduction to basic intarsia. Who knew intarsia could be this funky?

Then we have Classic Elite’s Shawls, Wraps & Scarves:  20 Ideas, 3 Ways (Sixth & Spring, 2012). The Big Idea here is, as the title says, multiple garments from a single stitch pattern. Maybe this doesn’t seem earthshaking, but each of the twenty prototype patterns is distinctive, and each is worked up in different yarns to different lengths and different proportions. It’s actually quite magical to see how a master pattern can yield differing results as the variables of yarn, needles, etc. change. The photography is really good, the garments beautiful. This book is my pick of the three, if you want to go with only one. It provides the most bang for the buck, if you think of its contents as really sixty patterns rather than twenty, and in terms of these patterns’ shelf life. They’re classic, elite, and will never go out of style. 

The most interesting of the three is Irish Schreier’s Reversible Knits (Lark, 2013). The Big Idea here is training a knitter to become adept at knitting garments that have no wrong side. It’s an excellent technical primer; there’s a lot of good information about stitch/fabric composition (including a small swatch lexicon that offers painless trialing of the techniques), and about fixing mistakes; and there’s an array of designs, ranked in difficulty from Beginner to Experienced, that combines beauty and technical expansion at every level. This is a book for a dedicated and curious knitter…in fact, I’m probably going to start on one of its patterns very soon!

So there you have it—three very different knitting book possibilities; together they’re fairly representative of what the annual crop of knitting books yields. Attractively designed, interesting to read, gimmicky to varying degrees, and offering solid technical advice, they’re good gifts for any knitter, including you.

Not Knitting New England...

...rather, knitted whimsy outside the only LYS in Melk, Austria (population 5,000), where I was last week.

I once attended a lecture on images of knitting in art, in which the lecturer opined that yarn bombing is a form of graffiti. Sometimes it is, I suppose, especially when the yarn bombers choose particularly noisome shades of acrylic, like neon lime green or Day-Glo pink.

Bicycles are apparently objects ripe for yarn-bombing--cf. the photo on this blog, last spring, of a yarn-bombed bike in Charleston, South Carolina. Perhaps it's the odd angles of the frame in contrast to the roundedness of the wheels that offer so much opportunity to practitioners of this so-called graffiti. Actually, I think in these bicycle examples, "graffiti" is a misnomer. Yarn-bombed bikes provide eye-catching advertising for their charming yarn stores, sort of like the shop-signs of yore that featured images of a merchant's or artisan's specialty.

Zum Wildern Mann, Passau

Anyway, I went inside Melk's LYS, "Frau Wolle," and poked around, and felt very much at home.

Earbud sleeve: a free pattern!

Some weeks ago I walked around New York City noticing how everyone was wearing earbuds, or, if their ears weren't plugged up, they had with artful insouciance slung earbuds and attachments around their necks or stuffed them into breast pockets as if they were spaghetti ascots. Instinctively I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to carry this off, because I am woefully maladroit in the tech-toys department, and deliberately uncool.

Perhaps this explains why it's impossible for me to keep my earbuds from tangling, no matter how carefully I roll them before stowing in a cute book-replica box that had once held a bar of soap. I pondered this a while. It then struck me that I could perhaps knit a cord cover, so that I wouldn't have to spend twenty minutes trying to straighten the buds before using them. (Proof of uncoolness: I use earbuds only to talk to H on my cellphone. This is because he claims to be unable to hear me during cellphone chats if I'm holding the phone near my face.)

I cast six stitches onto a #2 dpn, picked up another #2 dpn and began knitting an I-cord with leftover sock yarn. After an inch I decreased, over two rows, to four stitches, then stuffed the base (the plug) of the earbud wire into the knitted tube. The only thing one needs to keep in mind while knitting an I-cord tube around a wire, is always to bring the yarn around the back of the wire each time a new row begins. Work with a small ball of yarn, too, to keep the process manageable.

I continued to knit until the entire wire was swathed in I-cord up to the fork, where the wire divides to each earbud. At this point I consulted the Knitting Goddess, who advised me to increase to eight stitches, using the K1 M1 increase, then put four stitches onto a holder.

I continued knitting first up the left wire, then, picking up stitches at the fork, up the right wire.  I stopped when I got to the microphone, although you might want to stop earlier, and I cut the yarn, leaving a four-inch tail.  I removed the dpn.  The tail was threaded onto a yarn needle, and the needle drawn through the open loops, the yarn cinched, the tail cut, the end woven into the tube.  The same closure was effected for the left wire.  Et voila!

The next step was to figure out what to call this garment. I thought Earbud Sweater would do, but my pal, Pink Mohair, saw it yesterday and said, "It's not a sweater, it's a COSY." Then Neuroknitter saw it today and spontaneously announced, "It's a SLEEVE--an Earbud Sleeve." Amen to that!

So here it is--an Earbud Sleeve that keeps your wires from tangling! In a world where so little can be controlled, how thrilling is that?!

Photo credit:  R. Grahn

The next "IT" accessory?          Photo credit:  R. Grahn

September serendipity

This beautiful yarn came into my life recently, sent by Theresa Walker of Great Bay Woolworks. It's loosely plied, undyed, with a silky sheen, and it's 100% New Hampshire-raised wool. The texture is best for outerwear, though the Knitting Goddess thought it would make a great pillow done in a log cabin pattern like last year's afghan. (If I do that, I'll have to add a fourth color, however.) I'm asking you, gentle knitters, for advice. What should I make from three 200-yard skeins of of genuine New England farm-raised wool, that most likely would knit up best on size 5 or 6 needles? Let me know by blog comment or email.

If I use your pattern suggestion, I'll send you a great knitting book from my personal collection of great knitting books!

Kid stuff

Recently completed:  a pair of Portuguese-style baby booties that are quick and adorable, and the pattern is free from the Knitting Daily website.  What's not to like?

Taken with my new camera, an Olympus OM-D-E series.  The stalwart Panasonic Lumix of yore developed problems that led me to conclude I'd outgrown its capabilities.

I used leftovers of Online Supersocke--the grandmère of this baby has a slightly larger pair from the same yarn. Said grandmère's other grandson, now eighteen months, will get a pair of toddler socks from the rest of the remnants. I like to keep things in the family!

Portuguese knitting involves a different method than most Americans employ, and there are interesting video demonstrations to watch. You don't need to use the Portuguese method for this pattern, but it has efficiency and ergonomic advantages that could be useful to anyone who wants to decrease stress on the hands.  Worth having a look, methinks.

And while we are on the topic of knitting for kids, I must share a photo sent by a friend, who saw this little person at the Sterling (Massachusetts) Fair 2013, ongoing this weekend.

Credit:  Margaret Haynes-Lamont

Yes, her beautiful coverall is hand-knitted.