Wow, you guys love babies! We so appreciate all your congratulations — it’s remarkable to think that Minnow already has well-wishers from Australia to the Netherlands. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, y’all.

The queue of woolen garments to make for my little one wraps around the block, as you can imagine. But if all goes well, I’ll be bringing him or her home in the early or middle part of August. Just for fun, I looked up some recent August temperatures for Portland. Last year it was 95 degrees on 1 August. The year before that we hit 96 on 5 August. The 11th itself hasn’t been too bad recently: 82 degrees at most, so if the kid comes right on time we should be okay. But the 15th two years ago reached 100 degrees. In sum, wool probably won’t be the fiber of choice for a coming home outfit. So in an atypical move, I purchased some cotton-blend yarn: Kollage Luscious. I’m going to cast on Brandy Fortune’s Milk Infant Top and make some matching stripey pants or longies (we’ll see how the yarn holds out… it was on clearance so I won’t be getting more). I love the white and green of the original, but I only had two colors to choose from — luckily they go together and remind me of cinnamon toast.

(I need to try again at making the actual cinnamon toast. This uber-healthy bread we’ve got right now is too dense and I didn’t apply the prodigious amounts of butter that would have been necessary for really pleasing toast. Also I think the cinnamon toast of my childhood may have been made with cinnamon sugar, not just straight cinnamon.)

By rights I should be getting loads of knitting time during the many, many Holy Week services we have to sing, but alas, I’ve been moved back to the front row in full view of the congregation so I’m not allowed. Tonight alone I could have knit through three baptisms as well as the lengthy sermon. Well, maybe not the baptisms… we were still holding lit candles at that point. Turning the pages of my music without setting fire to them, the sleeves of my robe, or another soprano’s hair is challenging enough; knitting while holding a candle might really go beyond what’s possible. Instead I’ve had to amuse myself by choosing names for my child among the composers in the hymnal. How does Horatius Bonar strike you for a boy? No?

Anyway, now to bed. The first call for the choir tomorrow morning is at 7:30, and I might need to make another attempt at cinnamon toast beforehand so I can stay upright. Happy Easter if you celebrate it.

P.S. I think Minnow may be developing a fondness for the communion sherry during all these extra services.

I’m at that age, apparently. The age when one’s beloved coevals start procreating. (If you’re curious, the age is thirty. Some dear friends and most all my relations already have children, but this feels like the real surge of the wave coming on.) Fortunately I am well equipped for this, as I can knit. I learned long ago that blankets are not this knitter’s cup of tea, but hardly anything is more satisfying that a cute, fast baby sweater. And booties? Wee hats? They’re like potato chips.

There’s more than one kind of baby knitting, of course. There are the precious heirloom knits that will be exclaimed over but worn only a few times, if at all. There are rustic drool-proof knits (some of them are ugly, though obviously made with love) that can be worn to rags without compunction. And there are are the holy-grail knits that will be admired and worn regularly until the baby grows out of them because they are cute enough to elicit compliments from non-knitters. As far as I know, I’ve only achieved a couple of the latter. One was River’s Spiral Yoke. Another was the Baby Surprise with the improvised hood that Aila outgrew almost immediately, but which was passed along to Lyric, who got compliments on it from strangers who really should have said something (his mother felt) about how adorable the baby was first. I don’t believe it’s any coincidence these are Meg Swansen’s and Elizabeth Zimmermann’s designs, and I’ll certainly be knitting both patterns again.

But a girl likes a bit of variety in her knitting, and there’s a wealth of old patterns out there that look just as stylish today. Kristen Rengren has tapped into this idea with her Vintage Baby Knits, which I’ve got on loan from the library. Of the 30+ vintage patterns she’s collected and updated, I’ve got my eye on Betty Lou and Rufus. And here’s the yarn to knit them:

Above: Black Trillium Fibre Studio Merilon Sock in “pomegranate”

Below: Imperial Stock Ranch Tracie in “quail”

I wish these sweaters were for twins so these yarns could be together all the time, the colors are so delicious. Imperial Stock Ranch is an Oregon grower and Black Trillium is a local dyer.

Another vintage bonanza fell into my lap this weekend, when Mr. G’s mother brought over a couple of pattern booklets that had belonged to her mother-in-law. I now have the Bucilla Baby Book, revised vol. 339 from 1950, and Fleisher’s Baby Book from 1957 (if I’m reading my roman numerals correctly). They’re both chock full of adorable sweaters, booties, bonnets, blankets, longies, and much more — for knitting and crocheting. Several of the designs appear in Rengren’s book. Both booklets give gauge for every pattern, which isn’t always the case, although I chuckle at the recommendation for “non-inflammable” needles. I don’t knit that fast!

I’m not only knitting baby things, though. My Pas de Valse has seen quite a bit of action lately and has almost one whole sleeve. I needed my second #6 circular to work that sleeve, so I first had to finish the hood of my long-neglected Tomten. It only needs sleeves, now, too. I really want to try garter stitch jacquard to embellish the sleeve caps if I can find some directions for it. (Franklin Habit taught a class on it here last fall that I’d have loved to take, but I had another commitment that weekend and couldn’t really afford it anyway.) Next week is Spring Break, so I hope I can get lots of knitting accomplished!

Good for one Knitting Olympics finisher’s medal:

About this lever knitting business: several of you asked why I’d want to learn a whole different way of knitting, and it’s a good question. I am the kind of person who wants to know about this kind of thing just because it exists and because it’s so significant to the history of the craft (knitters who had to work fast enough to earn a living at it knit this way; our more familiar throwing and picking styles emerged from a desire to make the process of knitting look more ladylike).  I can’t yet lever knit effectively enough to make it faster than my usual throwing. But it does, in the mean time, let me use my hands and wrists in a different way, and as I now know from my class with Carson Demers, that’s a good thing. My work is all about using the computer, and between that and my knitting habit I’ll need to be careful if I want to avoid repetitive stress injuries. I was almost the only person in Carson’s class at Madrona who didn’t already have problems in the wrists, elbows, or shoulders, and I want to be able to knit in comfort until I’m dead. So changing up the positions in which I knit is a really good idea.

So back to this little practice sweater. I had the one lovely skein of Toots LeBlanc Jacob/Alpaca DK, but I knew it wouldn’t stretch to a whole sweater. I had some Rowan Felted Tweed in the stash that was about the same weight, so I figured I’d add a hem in colorwork. I thought I remembered Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mittens having some nice large botanical motifs, and sure enough I opened the book right to the page with the chart for Graph #53: District Unknown. And I only needed to increase three stitches to fit in three repetitions of the motif.

I only worked half the chart because I didn’t think a long cardigan would be very practical on a three-month-old, but I quite like the sort of wallpaper effect that results.

There was still the problematic neckline to deal with, though. I tried tacking it down a couple of different ways, but I just wasn’t satisfied. A hood seemed like the best solution, so I quickly knit one up in the Felted Tweed. And since I’d already given up on this little cardigan being unisex, I thought I’d use the last yard of the Toots LeBlanc for a little embroidery to match the buttons.

Ta-da! Another little sweater banked against the onslaught of 2010 babies. I really want a whole grown-up sweater’s worth of the Jacob/alpaca. So tweedy. So full of character. Love it.

No pictures yet because it really needs a blocking, but the little lever-knit sweater I’m calling Baltic Rose is all finished! Although I still had about six short rows to go when they extinguished the Olympic torch, I was finished and able to give the closing ceremonies my full attention by the time they rolled out the giant inflatable beavers in the finale (which was like a Bollywood musical number with lumberjacks), so I’m awarding myself a lever-knitting medal. And really, if I hadn’t decided at 3pm that what my little sweater really needed was a hood, I could have been done by the time the gold medal hockey game was over.

(I’m one American, by the way, who thinks that game came out exactly as it should have. I cheered when the U.S. tied it up in the last half-second of regulation, but I was glad Canada’s young star could earn his country the win in the end. Both teams played hard and well, it was dramatically close, it went to overtime but not to the somewhat hollow victory of penalty shots, and in the end the gold went to the country that really showed the passion to deserve it. If the Americans had won, we’d all have patted ourselves on the back, and some of our youngest hockey players would have remembered it for years, but there wouldn’t have been nationwide street parties, you know what I mean?)

Pictures soon and full details soon, I promise.