Computer trouble and incessantly grey skies have delayed this post, for which I apologize. But this is April in Portland – a flash of sun one moment, raining the next, and the heavens a dreary shade of porridge in between. Terrible photography weather. So my pictures of Hourglass progress aren’t of the quality I could wish. But I promised them, so here they are:

I’ll try to reshoot these in better light so the colors will be more accurate. My sweater is much less puce than it looks here. I’m calling this Brooks Farms colorway “passion fruit” and it’s quite warm and luminous, with shades of redbud, crimson, brandy and marmalade. As you can see, I’ve got some funky spiralling action on the body. Unfortunately, the stitch count I needed for the medium size was exactly right to produce terrible flashing. So I began alternating balls right away, but this was as much as I could do to mitigate the effect. The sleeves are more pleasing to my eye. But you know, I don’t need perfect stripes. What would be the point of knitting a sweater that looks like you bought it at Old Navy? My spirals are offbeat and organic, and sometimes it’s just best not to fight the yarn.

I’m almost done with the sleeves. Then Hourglass is going to take a short break while I use these needles to whip up my own personal take on the One Skein Wonder. Yes, you read that right. This self-avowed Shrug Hater is going to knit a garment without a front, against all her better instincts. Here’s the thing: the movers aren’t here yet, and they probably won’t arrive before Wednesday, when we leave for Mr. Garter’s sister’s wedding in Texas and my uncle’s in Kansas City. So what to wear? On a whim, I packed a single dress for the trip across the country. It’s a slinky brown cotton jersey number I’ve always wanted to go dancing in. And since I chose to spend my money on a pair of shoes I could wear to the weddings (I didn’t think my Puma sneakers would fit the bill) and some basic pants and shirts I got on mad sale at Anthropologie (I was going to cry if I had to put on the same two outfits one more time. I’ve been living in these clothes for six weeks.) – oh, and the 25%-off sale Knit Purl was having on Socks That Rock – I didn’t feel I could justify buying a new dress, too. So when I saw a skein of Cascade Sierra in exactly the same shade as my new shoes, I knew what I had to do to complete my outfit. Desperate times call for desperate measures, people. Fortunately, it’s slated to be 84 degrees in west Texas all week. I don’t have time to make anything more substantial. Let the speed knitting begin!

And hey, want to see the fabulous present my fabulous husband bought me?

Meet Domitilla. She’s a Bianchi Milano Centroventi. (Click the link for better pictures.) This is one sweet bicycle, my friends. She’s like the Mini Cooper of bikes. And she’s a snazzy custom model they made last year for the 120th anniversary – there are only a handful of them in the States, and she had to come all the way from Ohio. I haven’t had my own bicycle since I outgrew the one I had when I was twelve. After that I used my dad’s, and since I left home I just haven’t ridden one. But Portland is arguably the greatest bike town in the country, and since I don’t believe in driving the car unless it’s really necessary, this is how I’m getting around. (Don’t worry, I wear a bright red helmet when I’m actually going somewhere.) She obviously needed a classy and unusual Italian name, so I’m calling her after the little daughter of my favorite pro cyclist, Ivan Basso. I’ve already ridden her to the yarn store in the next town over. Now I just need some of those wicker paniers and an old-fashioned headlamp so I can ride around in a skirt and a handknit sweater with a silk scarf around my neck and look like a Rowan model.

Thank you all for your kind wishes – I wish I had time for personal responses right now. The face is doing pretty well: the swelling is down a lot and it doesn’t hurt anymore, and the stitches are supposed to come out the day after tomorrow. I bought a hat with a large brim to keep the sun off it while I was standing along the marathon route yesterday.

As for the reduction in adventures, I hardly know what to write, but I have more bad news. The marathon went very well, and the athlete Mr. Garter was guiding recorded a personal best. Mr. Garter was able to run the whole thing despite his lack of training and he felt terrific afterward. But then last night he got clobbered with what we hope is food poisoning and not an especially virulent stomach flu that’s been going around L.A. The poor guy is feeling perfectly miserable, so we are holed up at his uncle’s place for an extra day instead of being halfway to San Francisco right now.

That means extra knitting time for me, though, so I’m casting on my Hourglass sweater sleeves. My plan is to grit my teeth against the unhappy memories of two socks on two circs and work them both at once. I want to be able to wear this sweater before the weather gets too warm. I also finished my lace leaf scarf at last – hurrah! It had its debut at the marathon yesterday, as L.A. is colder than you’d think. Our hotel room was an icebox and it was quite chilly outdoors before the sun was high enough to clear the downtown skyscrapers.

That’s all for now – send my poor husband your best wishes for a speedy return to health!

At last I have pictures of my father’s finished Christmas sweater. When I say “finished”, I’ll add the caveat that I didn’t actually get to block it. I wove in the last end around 2 a.m. on Christmas morning, having worked a couple of inches of 2 x 2 ribbing for the neckband that incorporated my dad’s initials at the back. The initials didn’t show up as well as they should have, and the cast-off edge of the ribbing looked too feathery and soft for a man’s sweater. So on Boxing Day I tore out the section with the initials and worked a further inch of ribbing all around so I could roll the neckband to the inside for a rounded collar. I bound off and joined the seam using the sort of fake grafting sometimes used for shoulder seams. It looked great. So it was time for a photo shoot:

This isn’t the view from my house, unfortunately. We went on a little hike to burn off a little of the awesome toffee bread pudding my cousin made for Christmas dessert, and this is the view from the top of our little mountain. Here’s a closer view of the back of the gansey:

(I apologize that only the thumbnails are available at present. I think we’re going to install Lightbox JS in the next couple of days, which will allow you to click on the photo and get the full version, so check back.)

I like to think of this as Dad’s Sound of Music pose. Pretty cute, eh? It really shows how the sweater needs blocking, though.

Specs for Dad’s Christmas Gansey:

Most of 8 balls (about 1550 yards) of Jaeger Luxury Tweed in color “fern”

US size 6 Addi Turbos, 32″ long – and thanks to Lisa for the loan of the second circ that let me work the sleeves in the round!

Design is my own, via Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’s basic instructions in Knitting in the Old Way and Barbara Walker’s excellent first volume of A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I used the tubular cast on and worked the sweater in the round up to the armpits, then divided to work the front and back flat. I joined the shoulders using kitchener stitch, then picked up stitches around the armholes to work the sleeves in the round. Lastly, I picked up around the neck opening (I’d left the stitches at the front and back center live, on waste yarn) and worked the neckband as I described above.

We’ll close with a gratuitous cute puppy shot:

There hasn’t been much to see Chez Blue Garter, save the frantic blurs of pencil on graph paper and madly swatching needles on Jaeger Luxury Tweed. Yes, we are in the throes of holiday knitting. It’s not looking good for some of the secondary projects (certain people may be getting IOUs for socks, scarves, etc.), but the gansey may just come in under the wire, barring disaster. No pictures, but I’m sure you can imagine grafted shoulders and six inches of the left arm, picked up at the shoulder and worked on two 32″* #6 Addi circs (thanks, Lisa!). So nothing to see…until the mail arrived today:

Y’all, I may just have a new favorite online store. When I ordered sock yarn from Earthfaire, I was hardly expecting it to come wrapped in color-coordinated tissue paper, several packets of beautiful beads, a special little beading tool, and a page of instructions with a hand-written note. I know you can’t see all that in the photo, because I took this crappy picture on the ironing board under the fluorescent light in the living room. But I did get some fairly decent shots of the contents:

The first picture is Nature’s Palette merino sock yarn in colorway “Odd Duck 4”, a happy accident of the dye process for their green colors. It’s going to be those pretty leaf socks in the winter IK. I was planning to make nearly identical socks using Barbara Walker’s notes, but I’m not sure I would have thought to make the last leaf curl up the toe so beautifully. The second picture is Shelridge Farms Soft Touch Ultra in “Deep Blue Sea”, for these. A sock pattern so tricky it looks like it could make you cry? Sign me up, baby. I can’t resist. Who wants to make me a button that reads “Sock-Knitting Fool”?

And now, to bed. We’re not quite at the crisis stage of the holiday knits where we have to burn the midnight oil. A girl needs her rest and her wits to stay on top of Twisted Tree and Twist Stitch Diamond Patterns, you know.

*oddly enough, the needles are not actually the same length. Lisa’s is about seventh eighths of an inch longer than mine. Hardly the rigid German quality control I would have expected, but of little import for this project.