My father’s mother is the great craftswoman of our family. Knitting, needlepoint, sewing, rugs, interior design…she’s done it all in her day. She’ll be 90 years old in February. Everything she made is distinguished by her particular imagination and sense of humor – she loves wildlife and always wanted to make a rug with wild turkey tracks across it, for example. Among her finest creations is an enormous rug she designed and stitched over several years before I was born. It’s an inventive pattern of geometric ornament, fantastic creatures, and symbols of the family. It paints a picture of our family over the past four or five generations, including references to my mother and my aunt, who had recently married my grandmother’s sons when she made the rug.

All this was in the back of my mind when I set out to design a sweater for my father. I decided I’d select motifs that remind me of him and speak to the themes of his life. In the center panels, place, the island where he’s made our family home: ripple stitch for the sea, a single variation on Christmas Trees for the forested landscape and for his own woodland knowledge and woodworker’s craft, and raindrops for the Pacific Northwest. Gull stitch cables flanking the center panel. Then a ladder motif, because I needed a horizontal element, but also representative of his carpentry. Finally, for his Scottish heritage, a Scotch faggoting cable (a beautiful little openwork cable I unearthed in my Barbara Walker treasury, and I can trust knitters not to snigger about the faggoting, eh?), a column of willow buds for his spring birthday, and seed stitch around the armholes.

I charted all this out the weekend before last, and I’m happy to report no major bugs in my work in the first 25 rows. I worked the sweater in the round up to the arm holes, and now I’ve divided for the front and back. I’m also happy to report that working a pattern like this is a lot of fun. It’s giving me confidence that I’ll be able to carry off the Aran sweater my husband says he wants…but that’s a project for next year. The yarn, Jaeger luxury tweed, is a marled merino/alpaca blend that makes a nice soft fabric. The alpaca leaves a halo and the construction of the yarn – a fawn strand and a moss strand twisted together – isn’t ideal for showing off this kind of stitch work. The overall effect is more subtle than usual for a gansey, but then my dad is a pretty subtle guy. The sweater was bound to be non-traditional from the beginning, as he wanted a medium-weight sweater. I’d originally intended to use Blackwater Abbey Aran weight wool, but that would have produced a heavy sweater Dad could only wear on the coldest days in our mild climate.

Pictures to come when I’ve worked some more rows, and I’m still deciding about the design for the upper sleeves!

As you can see from the sidebar, there are way too many projects in the hopper Chez Blue Garter. In all fairness, I have every expectation of finishing Apricot Jacket this weekend: it lacks only buttons and there are a few more ends to weave in. The bolero won’t be far behind – I finished one sleeve knitting with the Spiders yesterday evening and it won’t take long to dash off another. The several yards of lace edging may drag out for another week or two, but I intend to finish it in time for a wedding in Chicago on September 16, and I think I’ll make that deadline. And I only have a few more inches of sock foot before the feather-and-fans will be ready for wear.

But let’s talk new projects. I’ve finally assembled the most recent for their mug shots. Thanks to a dull few days working up a manuscript for copyediting, I’ve had time to forge all the way through the first ball of Malabrigo, and I’m into the third straight-row repetion on my second Clapotis. Can we all take a moment of appreciation for the amazing yardage of the fabulous Malabrigo? I’m converting people right and left with this stuff. No one who’s touched it can resist its ample charms.

Then there’s Dad’s gansey. Happily, it turns out I can knit on the bus without getting carsick, so long as I don’t have to peer closely at what I’m doing all the time. The gansey was the perfect project to accompany me through the loooooong hours on the bus to DC last weekend. Unfortunately, despite all those hours of knitting, it doesn’t seem to have grown very much. This is going to be a dogged knit, I can tell. I’ll just have to plug away at it. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m knitting the back and the front simultaneously, so of course it seems slower.

Finally, we have the Lotus Blossom Shawl. I’m just getting the feel of this pattern, but I love the Helen’s Lace and cheery poppy color. A big thank-you to Amanda for lending me her Denise circs for this one – I knew it was going to be too slippery for Addis. Here’s a close-up:

Behold the creation of my noodly appendage.

Not that it looks like much yet. This one’s going to need a serious blocking odyssey.

Now that others have admitted to knitting in the nude during our New York heat wave, I feel I can show you what I was up to last weekend. Seriously, folks, it was far too sweltering outside to do anything but sit in front of an air conditioner or a fan or both, wearing as little as possible. You might feel the situation is not, therefore, conducive to allowing wool within fifteen feet of one’s body, but we all know how rational knitters aren’t. And all that immobility did seem like a good opportunity to finish planning my dad’s gansey. I’d been putting off casting on because I wanted to try all that tubular business and I knew it was going to take a good chunk of time, especially for a garment with 236 stitches per round. I had the pattern, I had the time…

Yes, friends, that is a genuine tubular cast-on. And it isn’t as tricky as you might think. It works roughly like this: Grab a set of needles 2 or 3 sizes smaller than you’ll need to get gauge for the project. (I’ll be knitting the gansey on US#6s, so I used 4s.) Cast on half the number of stitches you need in a smooth waste yarn. Purl one row, and then knit an elongated row (wrapping twice around the needle – pick up only the first loop on the next row). Then purl a row with the regular yarn and work three more rows in stockinette. Now the fun begins: use a skinny little needle (I used a little #1 circ) to pick up the bumps of main yarn you can see between the elongated waste-yarn stitches. Now you have the full number of stitches, but on two different needles. For a 2 x 2 rib, using the free larger needle (#4), purl two stitches from the large needle, then knit two stitches from the skinny needle. Then purl two more from the large needle, knit two more from the small needle, etc. Continue across the row, and on the next row, switch to the needles you’ll use for the body of the project (#6). Now you can snip out the waste yarn. Voila! A smooth, tubular edge!

It’s fun, I tell you. Takes a lot longer than a regular cast-on, but it makes the niftiest little rolled edge. Try it today – clothing is optional!

*I can’t wait to see the hits I get from Google with this title…