I finally bound off this:

Behold, a knitted amoeba. But bless me, it really does turn into a sweater!

Now to dash off a couple of insignificant seams (along the sleeve tops only – brilliant!) and sew on five cute buttons, purchased Tuesday at Josephine’s Dry Goods. I may crochet a single chain along the border just to polish it up a bit, and then it’s off to the recipient, possibly even before he arrives in the big bright world. (He’s due on the 11th. If there’s any truth to Stephanie’s theory that babies show up as soon as you’re done knitting for them, his mother will be ecstatic that I worked fast. I promise not to dawdle with those buttons, Misa.)

And, because I am a bad blogger, I’ve been withholding pictures of my Socktoberfest project. I give you the Drunken Bear Stocking:

I’ve long meant to work up a pair of socks based on the Bear Track pattern in the second Barbara Walker treasury. I thought I’d go ahead and work in some new skills, too: Toe up, baby! Via Turkish cast on! With afterthought heel! The Turkish cast on turns out to be a breeze, exotic as it might sound, and I can see many splendid applications for it — glove fingers, top-down hats, booties, all kinds of things. I haven’t actually knit the afterthought heel yet, so we’ll have to reserve judgment on that. But let me speak to you of the Bear Track pattern. First I had to adapt it for working in the round. Easy as winking on the foot, where there’s only one pattern repetition. But when I got to the ankle and wished to replicate the pattern all the way around the leg, a pint of Laurelwood Sticke Altbier helped me discover the following: if you complete the last round as I’d written, the bear tracks begin to stagger. At first I thought I’d correct my instructions, but then the idea of a drunken bear track sock delighted me. (Total coincidence: Google “drunk bear video” if you haven’t already seen it.) I thought I’d work a few repetitions and see how it went. The color isn’t behaving with such fawning obedience as it did on the foot, but I think I like it all the same. Maybe when I do Sock #2 I’ll make a designated driver bear with straight tracks, as originally intended. The yarn is, of course, Socks That Rock, colorway Red Rock Canyon. These are intended to be knee highs, and I intend to wear them while riding my bicycle. Thus I will fulfill two proud traditions at once: that of outrageously colorful long knitted cycling socks, de rigeur in the ’20s when cycling became popular, and that of Keeping Portland Weird. (Seriously. We have bumper stickers.)

Next time: a project I’ve been knitting in secret the last few days. Can you guess what it might be?

Zimmermania is under way. It’s a beautiful weekend for sawing firewood, and also for knitting baby sweaters. Behold the nacent Baby Surprise jacket, phase 1 complete. Doesn’t seem likely to turn into a sweater, does it? I promise it will look even more bizarre the next time you see it. But that’s the engineering genius of Elizabeth Zimmerman. You just gotta have faith and knit on.

…and then, Hot Damn! I wish I could knit like my great-granny! I’m hazarding a guess that’s who made these absurdly adorable tiny booties. They’re the greatest find thus far among the things shipped out from my grandmother’s house in Connecticut. They look too antique to have been made for my dad or his brother, so I’m going to guess they go back another generation. Some ancestress, anyway, had mad knitting skills, and I’ve been trying to puzzle out exactly how these booties were constructed so I can reverse-engineer a pattern. As far as I can tell, the garter feet were knit flat and seamed up, and then the ribbed section was picked up and worked in the round. There are little short rows on the heels and everything. And the gauge? Eleven stitches per inch, people. These were worked on much tinier needles than my trusty size 0’s, another factor that makes me think they predate the 1940s. Some woman lovingly patched a few holes, and they’ve been washed enough to have gently felted. I like to think of my father having worn them as a wee baby. Now I get to save them for my own offspring. Let’s have a little more gratuitous cuteness:

Yesterday I ended the longest knitting drought I’ve had since I began nearly two years ago. I hadn’t knit since the World Cup final, if you can believe it. Four whole days without knitting! That’s because my parents were here and we all rolled up our sleeves and plunged into home improvements with scarcely a break for food, let alone fiber. (I know we could argue they’re of equal importance, but food won out because I was already starting each day spinning during the Tour de France. Need I remind you that it begins at 5:30 a.m. out here in the west, on the sane days when they have the flat stages? We will not speak of the 3:30 start for tough mountain stages like yesterday’s. Not even I am that crazy.) We painted the basement, we built 80′ of shelving (yes, that’s feet, not inches), we sawed the boxspring in half so we could get it up the stairs at last, we unpacked and unpacked and unpacked some more. And guess what? The house is still full of boxes. And all the while, I was racing to meet freelance deadlines. So when I packed off the proofread galleys of The Society of Secret Superheroes yesterday afternoon, it was finally time to treat myself to this:

Dear neglected Viennese Shrug, thy yarn is like blackberry sorbet. Why have I not finished you yet? I’ve just joined the second sleeve for working in the round, so the knitting should move quickly from here. And I couldn’t resist showing you the view above my head as I lounged in the shady back garden. Anyone spurning pink and green as “so two years ago” ought to take a gander at my mimosa tree. Those were its flowers in the pictures of Pomatomus, outrageous blooms that remind me of punk rockers, fireworks, and sea anemones.

But now it’s back to work in the basement. I can hear Mr. Garter running the power tools, and sometimes he forgets to use the level. Plus there’s another segment of wall to paint “sunporch” yellow.

A good Bastille Day to the French folk out there!

I’m one happy girl: Mr. Garter is home at last. Not only has marital bliss descended once again Chez Garter – my sweetie quickly rearranged the computer cables I’d crossed and restored the internet, wrote a new access page so that Bloglines should be working again, and pointed out to me that he had not, in fact, taken the good camera with him to Texas. It was in the closet the whole time. So I needn’t have resorted to the markedly inferior old camera for these pictures. Oh well, the PowerShot S110 still deserves the occasional chance to shake its tail feather.

Without further ado, here’s what I’ve been working on this week:

Miss May is quite the little Victorian wonder. I’d checked Weldon’s Practical Needlework, Volume 4 out of the library and I was struck by the sweet vests for little children. What to do but break out the calculator and adapt one of them for modern materials and a wee baby size? I had two skeins of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino in the stash courtesy of Minnie, and this little garment knit up in a couple of evenings’ work on US #2 needles. The crochet edging was a different story, as I related below. Here’s how the neckline began:

Look at all those nifty little eyelets for the ribbon! I considered leaving the arm openings unadorned, as they appear here, but by the end I was rocking the treble crochet and couldn’t bring myself to stop. Besides, it adds that extra Victorian frilly flair. I’ve just finished reading Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, and since this pattern dates from the same era, I decided to call this top after May Welland, and sort of after Sassy Baby MJ, for whom she’s intended. Now she’s blocking, and unless she takes an awfully long time to dry, she’ll fly off to her tiny recipient on Monday. But I couldn’t let her go unchaperoned – she needed a little sweater for company, and I had some pretty raspberry Rowan All Seasons Cotton in the stash, too. At first I thought I’d make a Mason-Dixon Knitting baby kimono. I was rounding the bend for home when I noticed this:

Oops. It’s a little hard to tell from this angle, but see how the front edge of the sleeve is waaaaaay longer than the back edge? Um, yeah. It’s possible that I got a little too swept away by the pretty young things in The Forsyte Saga (I was really on a period drama kick while Mr. Garter was away… and by the way, why isn’t Lee Williams in more movies? So tasty! And Emma Griffiths Malin? So much more dazzling and talented than Keira Knightley. I would have let her play Lizzy Bennet. But I digress.) Anyway, I wasn’t happy with the way the neckline was turning out and I couldn’t tear myself away from the thwarted love unfolding on-screen long enough to figure out where I’d gone wrong with the sleeves and fronts, so I frogged. Actually, I didn’t even really frog – I just cast right on for the Last-Minute Knitted Gifts ribbed cardigan and unraveled the kimono as I knit. [Correction: this cardi is not from LMKG – it was merely with my stock of the patterns I photocopy for portability, and the layout was similar enough that I assumed it was from LMKG. It’s from a Debbie Bliss baby pattern book, and I can’t tell you which one because I gifted it to a friend. If anyone can identify the book, let me know – the pattern’s called “ribbed jacket” and the model on the adorable baby in the photo is fastened with a velvety rose pin. I could ask my friend, but she’s pretty busy with finals at the moment. Sorry to have puzzled those of you thumbing your copies of LMKG and scratching your heads!]

That’s better. So here you go, bitty MJ! I hope you haven’t grown too much in the past month to fit into these…