Lately I’ve had a lot of time to think between the hours of 4:30 and 7am. Ada has taken to waking up very early indeed, so she and I alternate dozing and cuddling in bed together while it’s still dark and civilized people are not yet beginning the day. And when I say “cuddling,” I mean that one of us is setting a good example by feigning sleep and the other is hooting, flapping the bed covers up and down with vigor, and pedaling the air like a capsized beetle. It’s a good opportunity to cogitate on various ideas for knitting designs, but sadly there are very few arms-free hours for the actual execution of these plans.

I have finished some knitting lately, though. I meant to have finished a second Small Things romper back around Thanksgiving, when my friend Linus welcomed his baby daughter. He and his wife had admired Ada’s snail romper, so I knew I’d have to make them one of their own. Two months on, it’s finally done. I hope the baby hasn’t grown out of it already.

This one is Dream in Color Classy; if memory serves, the colors are “Nightwatch” and “Lunar Zazzle.” They’ve been marinating in the stash for several years. The Small Things romper is an irresistible canvas, as I discovered with the snail version. So what did I add this time? A motif that’s been in the back of my mind since I discovered it on a Chinese robe that belonged to my grandfather.

Chinese lore tells us that bats are symbols of good fortune. I’d thought to make Auspicious Bat mittens, but the orientation of the motif just isn’t right. The bat is too wide; it’s 65 stitches. I love the sweep and curl of her wings and didn’t want to alter them. But a cloth-diapered baby bum? That’s a nice broad canvas. Here’s the front pulled open so you can imagine the wing wrapping around the stern of a chunky little baby:

When I did Ada’s snail, I used an intarsia technique. This time I had a line drawing rather than a more solid block of color, so I turned to duplicate stitch or Swiss darning, just tracing over the stitches in the contrast color after the romper was already knit. I’m quite pleased with the result; some of my early-morning musings have turned to modifying my chart to create a more solid bat suitable for Armenian knitting, as seen in my beloved missing rooster hat. I suspect that the design as it stands would be too delicate to read well in a fingering-weight yarn, and I do think Ada might need an auspicious bat hat. More to come on that, let’s hope, but as of now my little cherub is awake and only the cat’s antics in a large cardboard box are distracting her from the realization that she is catastrophically hungry…

P.S. Yes, you should admire my restraint in not titling this post “Bat A$$.”

P.P.S. The postman just came, and I’m sort of horrified to discover that having a baby will land you on a mailing list for Weight Watchers six months down the line.

Presenting some evidence that I can, in fact, set myself a series of goals and attain at least some of them: Blue Whale! This is the yarn and Stephen West pattern that made up the first installment of A Verb for Keeping Warm’s Pro-Verbial club, and according to Stephen it will be available to the public in April. I swore to myself that if I treated myself to club membership I’d knit each skein and pattern right away, and since Installment the Second has not yet arrived I get to pat myself on the back. I also get to give a pretty, functional gift to a dear friend. I knew as soon as I saw this murky, sea-colored yarn that it would have to be for Jen, because these are her colors.

The pattern is quite straightforward except that individual row gauge, which we all know varies wildly from knitter to knitter, affects whether or not you’ll be able to work the shawl exactly as written. If you just think of it as a patchwork of stockinet, reverse stockinet, and seed stitch and work each of those patches as you know it needs to be worked, you’ll be just fine. I also suggest the use color-coded stitch markers to remind yourself where the increases go, as you probably haven’t met with a shawl exactly this shape (it has five corners). Other than that, it’s the kind of easy knitting that won’t require you to refer to the pattern very often — perfect for tired mothers trying to squeeze in a bit of handwork after the little ones are abed!

Yeesh, those are some tired mother eyes…

I made Mr. G put it on while we did the pictures for Gridlock. At first he looked as though he doubted the manliness of a little shawl, but half an hour later I found he was still wearing it. If he mends his ways in the department of Keeping Track of Things Your Loving Wife Has Lovingly Slaved Over, I may even make him one of his own.

I hadn’t knit a hat in a good long while — I’d almost forgotten how satisfying they are. Vivian Aubrey’s snappy little Gridlock design caught my eye when she released it last month, and the timing was perfect because I needed a quick birthday present for my cousin Asa. Unfortunately, it was knit and gifted so quickly that I didn’t even get a photograph, but luckily I turned around a made a second Gridlock.

It’s Noro: Cash Iroha and Silk Garden (the colorway that also contains lavender and a splash of turquoise, but I didn’t get that far into the skein). I knit it a little bit too long. You’d think someone who’s been knitting for, what, eight years now? and has knit all kinds of lace and sweaters and designed her own stuff and whatnot could have mastered Hat Depth to Crown Shaping by now, but apparently you’d be wrong. I used to start the decreases too soon and the hats wouldn’t cover my ears, and now I seem to be over-compensating. So I’ve had to turn up the brim at the nape of the neck… here’s hoping my friend Caroline won’t mind wearing it that way, because it’s for her. Maybe I should knit more hats. Or, you know, use one of my several perfectly functional measuring tapes and start the decreases when the pattern says I should.

(I do have my next hat project picked out, though. I bought a copy of Westknits Book One today and it’s either Westward or Skinny Skid, depending whether I decide to favor myself or my husband. He’s mislaid my favorite rooster hat and his own Windschief, not to mention both pairs of gloves I’ve made for him, so I’m fairly sure he’s just not trustworthy with accessories and I should leave him to make do with whatever’s commercially available. But we definitely need more hats in the hat drawer.)

The holiday maelstrom swept us up and spat us out again two weeks later. Since I last wrote I’ve had food poisoning, a baby demanding bi-hourly night feeds for a week after the resulting drop in her milk supply, a cold, a leaky shower that may require retiling and new drywall, not to mention the usual commotion of parties and shopping and wrapping and eating… but also thirteen days of wonderful visits with family and the opportunity to squeeze my wee niece’s marshmallow-injected thighs even if I couldn’t snuggle her as I would have had I been healthy.

I finished the Tomten jacket for my nephew and gave it to him with Astrid Lindgren’s The Tomten and The Tomten and the Fox. It is far too big and will probably fit him next winter and maybe even the winter after. My pictures of it suffer sadly from lack of time, daylight, and styling genius, but some sort of documentation was necessary to prove that I finished the thing at long last…

Like how I didn’t even manage to get that sleeve unrolled all the way?
In my defense, it was coming on to rain pretty hard.
But I could have at least started with a smaller coat hanger.

The chief addition I made to Elizabeth Zimmermann’s excellent pattern was jacquard colorwork at the shoulders after Franklin Habit. Garter stitch jacquard (and I’m using the term as Montse Stanley does to describe stranded color patterning) is not difficult to do; you can work any charted design you’d use for regular stranded colorwork, except that you have to work each row of the motif twice: right to left and then left to right, so that your design reads on the garter ridges. On the wrong side there’s a pleasurable dance of the working and resting wools fore and aft to keep the strands on the inside of the sweater.

You do want to be careful about where you place this kind of patterning. I didn’t anticipate how much the jacquard portions would spread vertically, and my first attempt at shoulder decoration created a major puffed sleeve I didn’t think my nephew’s Texan father would appreciate. I had to scale down the motif to end up with just a gentle epaulet shaping. In a future Tomten I think I’ll try an even, ’round-the-hem motif and just a simple band at the shoulders, but the shaping I stumbled upon could actually be useful in an adult garment; EZ went to intricate lengths to incorporate it via short rows in Cully’s Epaulet Jacket. (She added a nice natural bend to the elbows in that design, too — can’t you just see a prettier, colorwork version of an elbow patch dressing up a tweedy jacket? It would be functional, too, as the jacquard stranding adds sturdiness…)

I also got a little fancy with the button loops. These are just short lengths of i-cord twizzled back on themselves and sewn down. They don’t have the elegant economy of EZ’s i-cord tabs or applied i-cord button loops, but I was splashing out.

So! That’s one longterm project put to bed for a cleaner slate in the new year. Now for that Helter Skelter argyle for my brother, and maybe even that wooly Manos blanket that’s been cryogenically frozen in the bottom of the workbasket for about four years… but there are always so many new projects beckoning! My mother went to Ireland this past year and couldn’t find an Aran sweater in natural brown. (The woman in the shop didn’t even believe her that sheep came in brown.) Obviously someone needs to do something about that, and a certain seminal text on Aran knitting happens to be back in print now… Na Craga’s been on my list of dream knits for years…

I’ll leave you with an appealing nephew anecdote. Background: Riley’s daycare provider was concerned that he’d feel left out because his mother requested that he drink water in his sippy cup all day rather than juice, which is what the other kids get. My sensible sister-in-law just pointed out that she could call the contents of his sippy cup “juice” and he’d be none the wiser — the little man isn’t yet two years old. So we got to the Oregon coast just after Christmas and Riley trotted over the dunes and caught sight of the pounding waves. He flung his arms wide and exclaimed, “JUICE!”

Happy 2011, everyone. I’m not making it an official resolution like Don’t Eat Vegetarian Food in Decidedly Non-Vegetarian Restaurants, but I’ll try to be in touch here more often.