Oh, May… one of my favorite months! The weather is summery (for a few days at least) and I’ve been struck with a mad hunger for summer knits. I say mad because I have knit various lacy tops and cottony shrugs and every time I swear off all that nonsense and rededicate myself to wool. I do not particularly enjoy knitting with stringy plant fibers that don’t give or spring or bounce or plump up agreeably to make your work look better than it is. And the garments themselves tend to get irrevocably baggy and formless, which is not a look that does my figure any favors. But I found myself trolling Ravelry and drooling over this and that, and oh, yes, this again… troll, troll, troll; drool, drool, drool. And I do have a fair amount of cotton in the stash… enough to make any and all of these…

You’re going to be so proud of me. I didn’t cast on a single one of those lovelies. Why? Because there are some shamefully neglected items in the knitterly sag wagon Chez Garter. Namely this: the Frost Flowers Pullover, ignominiously zzz’ing away at the very bottom of my Ravelry page. The date I put on it there would lead you to believe I’ve only been working on it for two years. This is certainly a bald-faced lie. I know I’ve had the yarn since 2005, the year the pattern came out in Vogue Knitting. It was never a favorite project. Let’s just see what I’ve had to say about it on the blog during that time:

“I hereby swear it’s the last time you’ll see me knit with such an unnatural fiber.”

“If I hadn’t been so wet behind the ears as a knitter when I took this project on, I would have substituted a decent cotton at least.”

“…afraid this yarn was going to look like a pox victim knit up… it’s more like the hide of some desert-dwelling feline…. the African Plastic Sand Leopard…”

You can see how the spark never really kindled between us. Trendsetter Spiral and I have been on a four-year bad date, the kind that ends with an unenthusiastic “Well, we have each other’s number…” and you know the relationship is going nowhere. But I am a knitter of integrity, dammit, and I still like the design, and the sag wagon basket is overflowing and spitting out remnants of yarn balls and forgotten swatches, and it’s far too warm to work on the Gee’s Bend blanket that’s also in there with all its attending Manos del Uruguay. I’m getting back on the horse and finishing this thing if it kills me.

Cue Chariots of Fire music.

A nice weekend with a visit from my friend Bronwyn (and her hilarious and wonderful friends who I wish all lived in Portland so they could be my friends, too) has quite scattered the clouds after my stressful last few weeks. We’ve had a stormy beginning to May, with thunder and lightning and drenching, sudden rain and just-as-sudden sun. It’s rare for the Northwest to see those pelting rains that knock the cones from the trees and recoil so hard from the pavement that the air above the streets is a blowing soup of spray.

Yesterday’s squall came through just after a baby shower for my cousin Ben and his partner, who will welcome a son next month. There were plastic babies in the ice cubes, which many of us thought was superbly creepy and which put me in mind of National Geographic articles about frozen ice men that fascinated me as a child. The funny part was listening to my aunt tell how much trouble it turns out to be to create clear ice–there was some sort of triple boiling of distilled water that took most of the day, and even then there were still crystals around the babies. Little thawed babies floating belly-up in your drink are sort of unnerving, as it turns out. I didn’t particularly want them to touch my lips. But on to the important part of the shower: the knitting!

This is a wee sweater I whipped up with my new little cousin-to-be in mind. It’s built on principles I like to think Elizabeth Zimmermann would approve of: plenty of garter stitch; no purling (really—even for the short rows to raise the back of the neck I knit back backwards, just for kicks); armholes made like afterthought heels so you can just keep buzzing round and around, then pull out the waste yarn and pick up sleeve stitches later; and her special i-cord button tabs. Here’s a cuff detail:

Mingus felt this photo needed a certain feline je ne sais quoi. Les chats, ils savent.

The unusual construction of the sleeve join means the sleeves can’t lie quite flat in the way you expect of sleeves, but in theory they ought to fit just fine on a three-dimensional baby and offer plenty of mobility for flapping one’s fat little arms.

I-cord button tabs.

I’m calling it the Islander sweater, not because I favor either of the New York hockey teams, but in honor of the island where this little boy’s papa and I grew up. I’ll be knitting a second version for another island baby due in June—a two-color variation this time, I think. It’ll be a great way to use up sock leftovers. This yarn, by the way, is one of the Pagewood Farms superwash merino sock yarns. It didn’t come with a color name, possibly because it was dyed as an exclusive for a particular yarn shop. It was a gift from my beautiful, articulate, witty, and talented friend Kristen, who I’d like to be when I grow up except that she’s only half a year older than I am, so I’m pretty sure there’s not much hope for me. One skein of this yummy stuff, which turned out to be one of the few variegated yarns I think is as attractive knit up as it is on the skein, was ample for the little (three-month size?) sweater. And there were leftovers. Look what I’m doing with them:

Regina Willer’s Blue Step Baby Booties are my new go-to baby present. So adorable! So fast! I cast on the second during this morning’s sermon (the choir director finally moved me to the second row—now I can knit away in between songs and the congregation will never know!) and I predict it will be finished by the end of Masterpiece Theatre tonight. The English translation is still a little bit quirky. Based on my knowledge of brioche stitch, I interpreted the half-brioche stitch pattern like this:

Row 1: *Sl 1 wyif, yo, p1*

Row 2: *K tog the stitch and the yo, p1*

The result looks like the picture, so I’m pretty sure it’s correct. The only other funny bit is where you decrease to form the top of the foot—you pass a slipped stitch over two other stitches, which isn’t totally obvious from the instructions.

And now it’s time to make supper. Something involving lemon-pepper capellini, red kale, and feta…

Despite lilac blossoms and sunshine and a bike ride and a giggly fit of middle-school-style note-passing (vive le hyphen) about cute boys during choir practice, I have managed to be rather glum these last couple of days. Apparently I am even grouchy when I sleep, because my husband noted having been kicked repeatedly. Sorry, honey. Also I have botched the foot chart of the Pomatomus sock for the eleventieth time, which is not like me as a knitter, due to the hubris I have exhibited in trying to knit without looking at said chart, which is. This pattern has my number. I have ripped back yet again.

But sometimes I find bright, glowing things to carry with me until the light returns, as it certainly will in a day or two. This is one: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

If you haven’t beeing following Maira Kalman’s “And the Pursuit of Happiness” illustrated blog over at The New York Times, do yourself the favor of clicking through. I *heart* her.

What a fine day. Dad let the dogs out early, so I was still in bed to hear something extraordinary: when Lark barked at something in the woods, a raven mimicked her voice, and then another raven joined in the joke, and soon the dogs across the valley started barking back. The ravens really do a very believable dog sound — I knew it was them because I’d been hearing them quork and chuckle and because the racket was coming from the treetops, but otherwise that gravelly barking would have sounded pretty authentic. I’ve never heard them do this and I was so tickled.

Breakfast was freshly baked ginger scones, which take very little effort if you’ve got cream and crystallized ginger on hand. I drank coffee with them this morning, but now that it’s teatime I think another might go down nicely with a cup of vanilla leaf black tea. The sunshine has held and Mum and I have had a lovely walk up the high point at the north end of the island, known to me all my life as Mount Young, but officially (and more accurately, because it’s only about 700 feet tall) as Young Hill. The air was very clear today, so with the long lens I could get these mountains to the north in the blue distance:

(My Connecticut-dwelling grandmother came to visit my parents in the early days of their residence here, and when my mother pointed out the snowy Olympic range across the water Grandmummy said, “Oh no, dear, those are clouds.”)

Setting up a portrait with dogs was a trickier business.

But this is why I’m sorry I don’t get up home more often, and why I’ll never be quite satisfied with life in the city. A person gets spoiled growing up with this sort of thing in the background all the time.

It’s only March, so the nights are still cold. I sat outside to peel apples for sauce after the walk, but now the sun has dropped behind the trees and it’s nice to be inside with a fire in the woodstove and a pile of wool to knit. Tomorrow we go back to Portland, where we’ll be glad to see Mr. G and enjoy a few more days of Spring Break.

But we’ll be back this summer, and in the mean time we have memories and pictures.