Life as a Spectator Sport

44" of Drop-Stitch Scarf, one whole skein of Berroco Camouflage. I could have made it longer, as I have at least one more skein. I could have put the stitches on a stitch holder, made another of Lee Meredith's Short Row Wavy Hats from the second skein, and then used whatever was left to extend the length of the scarf. The unpleasant truth is that I got tired of it. The pattern is exceedingly easy. It's beyond mindless knitting, or perhaps it's the epitome of mindless knitting. In any case, by the time I got near the end of the skein, I was totally bored with it. My aunt, to whom I'm going to send it, will not complain if it's only 44" instead of 48" or a bit longer.

I haven't seen this aunt in many years, but I lived with her family for a couple of summers after high school, earning money for college. She fell recently and broke her hip, the first of three family members to do so (counting the dog as a family member). I sincerely hope that three is the magic number and no one else takes a tumble. My multiply-injured left knee is now arthritic, and I have this nagging perpetual worry that some day it's going to just give way and dump me on whatever surface I'm walking on. Given that I frequently walk out into the middle of streets and highways to take exterior pictures of the stores I inspect, this is more than just a trivial concern.

So now I shall make another hat, and then a couple of Christmas gifts, and then perhaps a scarf for myself.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Scarf Love

I made a Clapotis last year, but didn't finish it until the end of winter, so it didn't get worn more than once or twice. When I was unpacking the cold weather clothing last weekend, I realized that I never photographed it after it was finished. So here it is in all its mis-matched glory, made of two not-quite-the-same skeins of hand-dyed fingering from Virginia's own Misty Mountain Farm. I discovered after I was well into the first skein that the second skein wasn't identical. I had pulled them both out of a large basket of yarn at Misty Mountain's display at NoSoKnit, and at the time thought I had two of the same. By the time I realized they were different, it was way too late to find a match for either one. So I just used them both, the blue and pink variegated for the ends, and the purple and bronze for the middle.

I never cared for scarves. Of course, that might have had something to do with a young adulthood spent in Florida, and most of the rest of my life in the coastal areas of Virginia, neither of which gets cold enough often enough to justify knitting many scarves. But since knitting the Clapotis, and also a Wavy Scarf, I've fallen in love with them. Today I picked up a copy of the Interweave Knits book Scarf Style, and I want to make nearly all the designs. I've got four skeins of variegated lilac lace weight Malabrigo, which I think will have to become Ene's Scarf, a lovely small triangular shawl in an Estonian pattern from Nancy bush.

After I finish the Drop Stitch Scarf, of course. And the second soaker for my granddaughter and the one that Katy would really like to have for the baby she's taking care of. And the two pairs of socks on the needles, and the second baby sweater for Vera. And whatever else I can't remember right now, sigh.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

On a roll

Between a certain amount of laziness yesterday morning and some truly nasty weather, I didn't make it to the post office after all. So the package will now contain one additional knitted item for Vera, a two-tone pink soaker from Punk Knitters. It's too big for her to wear now, but I liked it so much that I'll probably make at least one more that will fit her better now.

The dark rose pink is Cascade 220, part of my substantial cache of Cascade. The lighter pink is Louet Riverstone, which I picked up from Knitter's Knook in Boones Mill, Virginia, just before Becky closed her doors. I was lucky to get there on the last day, and scored some serious good stuff (a sweater's worth of Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, among others).


I worked a ruffle across the back, and it came out so well that when I make the next pair, I'll probably put two ruffles on it. This was done by working one row of knit stitch on what should have been a purl row on the back, leaving a row of double bumps on the right side. I picked up stitches through those bumps, purled back, worked a row of k3, inc 1 across, and finished with a couple of rows of stocking stitch before binding off. I think that was too many increases, so for the next one, I'll make fewer and see how that looks. But I'm happy with how this came out. The ruffle may not stand out as much with a diaper under it as it does when the soaker is lying flat.


On the needles now is a Drop-Stitch Scarf, one of the patterns I experimented with when I was trying to find something suitable for the orange and green lace-weight merino. I tried this one years ago with the very first ball of hand-painted Koigu I ever bought, decided it was the stupidest pattern I'd ever seen, ripped it out, put the yarn away, and still haven't made anything with it. But a friend started one, and I really liked the way hers looked, so here it is in some Bernat acrylic from stash, something I bought a while back because it was on a huge sale and I liked the colors. If I have enough left when the scarf is done, I might make another of the Short Row Wavy Hats to go with it.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Lotsa FO's

I seem to have finished an amazing number of things lately. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I had an amazing number of unfinished things to start with!

Tomorrow I'll send off this stack of knitted items for my grandbabies. The Ducky Blanket and "ragg" socks on the bottom are for my grandson, and the others are for the new baby sister--the Feather and Fan Blanket, the Jelli Beenz sweater, the Mason-Dixon bib, a pair of socks and an organic cotton washcloth.

I finished the Ducky Blanket a long time ago, but I hated the yarn so much that I couldn't bring myself to pick it up again to weave in the hanging loose ends. It's an acrylic boucle, and the rest of the box that I so stupidly bought will go to the next Stash Reduction Festival at A Likely Yarn in December.


Besides the baby things, I also made this hat for my daughter-in-law, who fell this week at work and broke her hip. It's Lee Meredith's Short-rows Wavy Hat. It would be somewhat more spectacular in a variegated yarn like Noro, or something else with a long color repeat. But I liked the style details even without the color changes. It has a band of garter stitch as a faux-rib cuff, a band of diagonal stockinette made by knitting two stitches together on one side and increasing a stitch on the other, and then a band of plain stockinette below the spiral section created with wrap-and-turn short rows. I used some wool and cotton yarn that JoAnn Fabrics was selling last year called Dolcetto, and it's amazingly soft and warm. The knitting itself went very fast, a couple of hours at the most. I didn't make the little nubbin on the top, just pulled the top closed and secured the end. The style has a very 1930's cloche look to me, and the i-cord nubbin didn't seem to go with that.

The only problem I ran into was with the seam. The pattern recommends a three-needle bind off, and I decided to kitchener instead, to avoid the little rib on the inside. It turned out okay, but the kitchener didn't work as well with the spiral pattern as I had thought it would. I'll definitely be making more of these, so I'll do the recommended bind-off next time.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Knitting in the wrong direction

I wish I could say I had become adept at knitting backwards; it would be a great help with the current entrelac project. Unfortunately, I'm UNknitting. AKA tinking. AKA picking out twelve bloody rows of 91 stitches each.

The feather and fan pattern on my baby blanket has 17 stitches in each pattern repeat, and on one of the rows, as I absent-mindedly counted them, I realized I had only counted 16. No problem, I thought--the stitch marker at one end or the other had probably worked itself one stitch over again. That has happened a couple of times--they're tiny rings of flexible vinyl, and occasionally one of them will flex and twist itself right under the stitch it's supposed to be marking.

But no. There really were only 16 stitches between the markers. I flipped the blanket over so I could check the right side, and sure enough, I had missed a yarn-over in the last pattern row. Worse than that, however, there was a glaring problem with the pattern several rows back. Twelve rows back, to be precise--three repeats of the four-row pattern. Was it visible enough that I really had to tink back that far? I didn't dare just rip it out. I'd do that with stockinette and trust to my skill in picking up any lost stitches, but not with a lacy pattern like this. But I couldn't get my brain around the amount of time it would take to tink back one stitch at a time, not that far.

In the end, I just did it. The blanket had been perfect up to that point, 30 inches of beautiful Feather and Fan. I don't know whether the recipient would ever have noticed, but I couldn't stand for it not to be perfect. So I picked it out, one stitch at a time, until I got back to the point where I had messed up, started forward again, and then discovered another mistake. Fortunately, it was in the same row as the first mistake--I was obviously having a bad day! So now it's all fixed and I'm knitting in the right direction again, and with total paranoia counting every single stitch between every single marker.

Re the entrelac--this has to be the most frustrating project I've ever attempted. Not because it's entrelac; that's easy. But this yarn just didn't know what it wanted to be. I tried Branching Out from Knitty, I tried one of the numerous variations of the drop-stitch lace pattern, I tried an Estonian lace pattern from Eugen Beugler, nothing worked. It's a hand-dyed lace weight merino, lovely to hold and work with, but 1) the color segments are so short that no matter what I tried, the colors just mushed up together, and 2) these are not my colors. Not. My. Colors. Orange and green were my high school colors, and I wore them proudly at the time, but no one has ever caught me wearing them since then.

I finally appealed for help on one of the lists I'm on, and someone suggested entrelac. That's really the only feasible choice for a yarn with very short color repeats. It still took multiple tries to find a combination of block size and blocks per row that would give me something acceptable. I guess I should have just put the yarn up for trade on Ravelry, but it was a gift and I felt obligated to make something with it. I still don't like the colors and it still isn't pooling as I had hoped it would, but this is the best I've gotten from it so far. So it's going to be a six-stitch entrelac block with eight blocks across. Entrelac goes quickly, so I hope I'll be done with it soon and never have to look at it again. It'll go in the emergency gift box along with a couple of other things I forced myself to finish but can't imagine ever wearing.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Open season

No, not on deer, on health insurance. Along with the other surprises of the holiday season come the announcements of premium hikes and increased co-payments. When I first moved out here and began managing Clarence's medications, his co-pay was $10 for a 90-day prescription. Over the years, it slowly increased from $10 to $12 to $18. Two years ago it went to $25, and last year to $35. We just learned that next year the co-pay will be $65, almost double. Granted, this is still a heck of a lot better than having no health insurance at all.

Interestingly, the co-pay is still $10 for generic drugs. But three of his medications have no generic equivalent, nor does the insulin. His doctor and I are going to have a nice long talk very soon about why he needs a prescription form of vitamin D instead of an OTC preparation, and why he can't use the older, now generic, form of one of his other drugs. Fortunately his doctor is one of those who actually listens when you try to tell him something.

On a happier note, here is a recently finished pair of socks I made for my grandson. The yarn is Plymouth Sockotta again. This is a variegated colorway with a very long color interval, too long for a pair of small socks like this. It would have made wide bands of color rather than stripes. So I pulled out just the lightest color of denim blue for the leg and foot, and changed to one of the darker blues for the toes. Made for a lot of loose ends to weave in, but I really like the finished product. I photographed the socks on the keyboard of my laptop, which seemed appropriate, since most of the knitting took place at the computer.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

More baby things

I've been meaning to post this, but it sat in the background for quite a while as I worked on other things. Now it's far enough along to look as though it might actually be finished soon (I have a bad reputation for starting something for a child and not finishing it for, oh, thirty years or so--I just found a sweater I began for my 38-year-old son when he was two).

Feather and Fan on a large scale, my all time favorite pattern. By the time this is finished, I may be good and tired of it, though. The yarn is Bernat Satin, in the Banana colorway, brighter than it looks like in the picture. So far, it has taken two skeins and a bit to get to about 30" long. I'll finish out the skein, however long that makes it--I'm guessing it will be 36" to 38" with the garter stitch border. The yarn is acrylic, not what I prefer, and because of the lacy pattern, it's unlikely to ever be machine washed. But I loved the color so much that I decided to use it anyway.

Then it's back to socks. I have to frog the original Jaywalker and re-do it smaller, finish the pair I started with my handspun, and another pair started with some Regia I got in the most recent coffee swap on Ravelry. Sometimes I wish I were a faster knitter, but then I'd probably have twice as many UFO's.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

A moment of history

I happened to stop for coffee this afternoon in a local convenience store at the same time that a Virginian-Pilot newspaper delivery truck drove up. As the driver was setting a stack of papers on the newstand, it dawned on me that this must be a second edition, and that it might be a good idea to grab one. So I now have a copy of today's Virginian-Pilot with President-elect Obama's smiling face covering the whole front page.

Watching the evening news, I learned that this was only the third time the Pilot has issued a second edition. The first time was to announce the end of World War II, and the second instance was on September 11, 2001. I think yesterday's election certainly has equal historical significance.

Two miracles

A national one, and a personal one. The national one first, that an African-American man could become President of this nation. It's still hard to fully take in. I spent my teen years in the segregated South, where adult blacks still stepped off the sidewalk to allow a white child to pass, where the black school janitors had to carry paper cups with them so they could drink out of the students' water fountains, where a grown black woman, a teacher in the local black elementary school, apologized to a white 12-year-old for having the temerity to offer me a ride when she saw me walking home in the rain. I didn't think I would live to see this day.

I was struck by what Christiane Ananpour said this morning, that this election was like the ones she had seen in countries having their first democratic elections--people standing in line for hours to vote, and joyous to be able to do it. It's an apt comparison. We've had a long eight years of non-democratic rule, of seeing our freedoms slowly taken away from us, of subtle and not-so-subtle threats against us as individuals and as a nation. I have no illusions that all these things will evaporate overnight. It took more than eight years for some of them to be put in place--neo-conservative extremists have been working out of sight for decades. But at least this is a start.

And to give John McCain credit where it's due, his concession speech was McCain at his best. I could have voted for that man, if he hadn't lost his way. He gave up his principles in order to win votes, and I couldn't respect him for that even if I hadn't disagreed so strongly with some of his positions. But he took back the mantle of decency and principle last night, and he deserves the country's good wishes for that, if nothing else.

And the personal miracle? My Australian Shepherd, Rippy, was hit by a car last Thursday. His hip was broken in three places and the vet said he would need a metal plate to repair it, specialized orthopedic surgery that is done in only a few places. Four to five thousand dollars worth of orthopedic surgery that Shelley and I could not possibly pay for. We were looking at the possibility of having to have him put down. But the vet said nothing could be done before Monday in any case, and when I went over to Shelley's house on Monday to see him, expecting to find him lying on the sofa with his eyes glazed in pain, he rose from where he was sitting in the yard and walked toward me. I could hardly believe my eyes. He's limping badly and is clearly in pain, but for him to be able to walk at all is a miracle. Shelley said she took him back to the vet Monday morning, and the vet said to wait about 30 days to let the blunt force trauma heal, and to see how much bone healing would take place on its own. If he still needs surgery at that time, she said it would be a much more simple surgery that she could do in her veterinary hospital.

To say that Shelley and I are relieved would be the understatement of the century. Rippy hasn't lived with me in a couple of years--he went to live with Shelley when Clarence became so incapacitated that he couldn't stay home by himself when I was gone. Rippy couldn't be left alone for days at a time, so Shelley took him on the truck with her, and he's lived with her ever since. But he's still my big puppy and the thought of having to kill him because I couldn't afford the medical care he needed was almost more than I could deal with.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Spinning, for a change

Last year at Rhinebeck (over a year ago, in other words), Katy bought a fluffy ball of variegated green and purple Corriedale roving, which I was supposed to spin up for her. Right.

Well, I actually finished it. It isn't plied yet, but I'm so pleased with it that I had to show it off anyway.

I never took a picture of the roving itself, unfortunately. But here it is on the bobbin, ready to be skeined.


I baptized my new skein winder with Katy's yarn. New is a relative term, of course. Like the roving, it was purchased at last year's Rhinebeck. I just recently managed to put it together, and today was the first time I used it. The counter on top is really handy, much nicer than having to count loops on a niddy-noddy.


Skeined up and ready to have the twist set. It's a bit overtwisted, but that will be accounted for in the plying. This picture doesn't give a good representation of the colors, but the picture above shows them pretty well.


Kristin said she was going to bring her wheel to the coffee shop on Saturday, so I rashly promised to do the same. Rashly, because I knew the belt was fraying--it had stretched out to the point where I was having trouble keeping adequate tension on it. But I had a spare belt, so I thought I'd just take that along with me. I gave the wheel a good once-over Saturday morning, decided I didn't need to worry about the belt after all, and went off without it. So of course, it broke. I couldn't stand not being able to spin, so I walked over to the hardware store and bought a ball of cotton twine. It stretched out, of course--I've already had to re-tie it tighter because it stretched beyond the point where I could adjust the flyer to compensate. But it worked, and let me finish spinning Katy's roving. Now I just need to wet it, whack it good on the side of the tub, let it dry, and ply it, and she'll have roughly 115 yards of light fingering weight yarn to make something pretty with.

The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section

This site is a member of WebRing. To browse visit here.

Plastic bags consumed this year: RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email to liz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, partner of seven years to Kate, a Democrat, Christian, lesbian. No apologies for any combination of the above. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHAT TIME IS IT? INTERNET TRAFFIC REPORT WHO IS VISITING SOCIAL SECURITY CLOCK Which one has the Crisis ?! SOCK KNITTERS and KNITTING BLOGS A Stitch in Time Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits BUTTONS Join | Previous | List | Next CURRENT and FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- MY COMMUNITIES MY STASH www.flickr.com This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called stash. Make your own badge here. YARN CRAWL Yarn Barn The Woolery POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES AmericaBlog Bark Bark Woof Woof Beast of Sound Blog on the Run Brad Delong Daily Kos Eschaton FireDogLake The Fulcrum Making Light Now Entering Laboville Old Fashioned Patriot Political Animal PressThink Rage Against the Right Sisyphus Shrugged Talking Points Memo The Next Hurrah The Yellow Doggerel Democrat A View From A Broad Wampum GOOD PEOPLE Notes from a Hillside Farm BOOKS I'M READING Thieves in High Places The Best Democracy Money Can Buy ARCHIVES April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002