Oh, puppies. Lark is out of the play-play-play-SLEEP-play-play phase, but we’re up visiting my parents and their four-month-old Labrador. Sonnet was a little shy of Lark at first, but by the middle of the next day she’d worked up her confidence and it was full-force Bear Pit Wrestlemania under the table, in the kitchen, around the central chimney… all day and late into the evening.

Then some friends came over for dinner yesterday and we added Karuna to the doggie mayhem. Karuna and Lark were cut from the same cloth, only Karuna’s piece was bigger. They took a liking to each other immediately and wore a racetrack around the fringe of the lawn while Sonnet watched cautiously. Karuna understands that it’s fun to play tug-o’-war with a toy, and not just jump on each other’s heads. (Sonnet seems to realize that she’s quickly going to weigh twice as much as Lark and is already practicing using her bulk to squash the foe.)

We are wild scraggly dogs who will roam free over the earth
when you humans and your pudgy Labradors are gone.

But at least Lark is willing to distract Sonnet while I knit. She bites the needles and I had to pull the end of my contrast color out of her gullet while I was swatching for Mom’s new sweater.

So innocent.

A selection of Cascade Rustic + Eco Wool for the background.

I had almost forgotten how odious it is to knit a flat colorwork swatch, especially on big needles. This cardigan/jacket will have to be steeked for sure. At first I was thinking maybe the blue was too bright, but then I decided the sweater might be boring if it was all dull earth tones, and the blue is a streak of merriment to brighten it up. Plus Mom is blue eyed and fair, so it will suit her coloring better if it’s not too drab.

The sun is finally out just a bit, as you can see. Time to take the Wild Bears for a little hike. I think I’ll drag out Dad’s giant camera lens and see what there is to shoot at the top of Mt. Young. Maybe this will be a two-fer day at the blog!

Those Estonian lace knitters are a clever bunch. Having invented the nupp, some canny lady (or ladies) went on to explore further sculptural possibilities arising from dramatic increases and decreases of stitch groups. To make a nupp you knit and yarnover into the same stitch several times, then purl all those new stitches together on the next row. But it turns out you can knit some pretty exciting shapes if you nuppify a big decrease, knitting and yarnovering into a k3tog or even a k5tog a bunch of times. And then you don’t even have to purl them all back together right away. At some point, some rockstar of a knitter (probably in Estonia, although Nancy Bush isn’t sure the technique wasn’t imported from elsewhere; her traditional lace knitter friends don’t use it) figured out how to make something that looks like this:

See the little three-petal flower shapes? Only the top two tiers are correct; it took me a bit of trial and error to reverse engineer this swatch from a photograph. But using what I’d learned in Nancy’s class at the Nordic Knitting Conference, I figured out how to do it, and that made me feel like the cat’s pajamas, I can tell you. Pretty, no? I think it would be overwhelmingly fussy used across a large area, but I can imagine deploying it on the cuffs of some delicate gloves, or perhaps the hem of a girl’s party dress or a dainty sweater.

Speaking of dainty sweaters, I finally fixed the sleeves of my little manlified February sweater for the new nephew, and I mailed it off to his mother during the weekend. Want to see?

Baby Sweater on Two Needles, Knitter’s Almanac: February, by Elizabeth Zimmermann

substituted garter diamonds for the gull lace

2 skeins Rowan Calmer in a nice red (which bleeds terribly in hot water, unfortunately — I’ve warned Amy about washing it separately so as not to turn all the neph’s onesies a very girly pink)

The babies are going to start arriving by the tractor-load in June, so I expect to have wee sweaters on the needles almost continuously. Thank goodness EZ bequeathed us so many appealing designs for them. And thank goodness for Spring Break and extra knitting time! Mrs. Pom is ’round the heel and almost through the gusset; I hope to finish the second Emily sleeve in the next few days (providing I can puzzle out why the sleeve-cap of the first seems to be impossibly short and solve the problem). Mum and I have just bought wool for her next sweater, which will not be a fair isle but a heavier EZ Three and One cardigan in oatmealy Eco-Wool and Cascade Rustic in brown, blue, and green. I’ve already swatched.

When the likes of Nancy Bush, Susanna Hansson, Marianne Isager and Evelyn Clark, to name a handful of the excellent instructors featured at the 2009 Nordic Knitting Conference, turn up within 200 miles of your home, there’s only one thing for it: pack your needles and hit the road! So that’s just what Jen and I did.

We drove up Saturday and perused a couple of yarn shops (I grabbed two skeins of lovely heathered brown Raumagarn for Husband Gloves at Acorn Street; Jen chose some natural alpaca at Weaving Works to stretch the double-knit scarf she’s been knitting as long as I’ve known her a bit farther), then met several of my childhood friends for Thai food.

Next morning we rose early to an unexpected snowfall–just to get us in the mood for Nordic woolens, apparently. Warmed by cream of wheat and the anticipation of a whole day’s glorious knitting in the presence of the masters, we drove to the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Fluffy flakes the size of crumpets–really, some of the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen–were falling and obscuring the street signs, but we made it to class with plenty of time to pour ourselves some coffee and find our classrooms. Jen was off to study Rovaniemi mittens with Susanna Hansson; I tackled an Estonian Lace Sampler under Nancy Bush’s tutelage.

The Nordic Heritage Museum is in a building that looks as if it may have been a school–a stately old school with the most enormous lighted windows and cozily worn wooden handrails on the broad stairs. The snow lingered long enough for Nancy to take advantage of the dimmer light and show us slides of Haapsalu and the surrounding countryside, then cleared off under a violent east wind that brought sunshine and flooded our room with natural light. Just the thing for lace knitting and for appreciating the workmanship of the scores of beautiful shawls Nancy had heaped on the center table (and quite a contrast to my experience trying to study color for fair isle under horrid fluorescents in a hotel conference room at Madrona).

Nancy gave us seven different Estonian lace charts to try: twig pattern, leaf patterns, peacock tail, several lily-of-the-valley variations, and a rose motif that looks like hearts in quatrefoil named for Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo is all made with nupps, a technique I was eager to learn. My tablemate Ingrid got me started while Nancy was busy elsewhere, and soon I was nupping away with confidence and pleasure, convinced that the nupp is an ingenious invention that I ought to be putting all over my knitting. I also managed a peacock tail segment and one of the lily-of-the-valley motifs by the end of the class:

Yes, it badly wants blocking, but I’m planning to add the rest of the charts from the class handouts, plus others from Nancy’s Knitted Lace of Estonia. And I’ll say more about this next time, but I’ve already worked a fourth segment that makes me feel like a total rockstar. So eventually I’ll have a whole little scarf, if the Jamieson’s Ultra holds out.

During lunch we wandered the parts of the museum that were open, including a big exhibit of Elsebeth Lavold’s Viking Knits and a room full of historical woolens. I saw many of the famous Selbuvotter, a tam and a rad viking ship pattern on a sweater I’d love to copy, and a few intriguing construction techniques I want to try. There was also a wee marketplace upstairs, and after class I went back and splurged on a couple of skeins of Toots LeBlanc angora/merino. Michelle, the owner, was wearing a little cocoon-stitch capelet of it that I couldn’t take my eyes from, and since I’ve been groping her yarn at every Northwest fiber festival for the past three years, I decided it was time some came home with me.

Yum.

Jen and I were plenty tired by the time we made it home to Portland (having stopped for tasty Mexican food at La Tarasca in Centralia, our go-to spot for nourishment on the way home from Seattle-area knitting events), but it was well worth it. And I did this in the car:

Pomatomus is finally getting a mate. Mrs. Pom is already the better sock by virtue of my reading the instructions instead of watching World Cup soccer while knitting. (Yes, the World Cup was in 2006. Mr. Pom has been baching it a long time.) And ain’t she cute on the Darn Pretty needles? This is one of the best yarn : pattern marriages I’ve ever achieved. Claudia Handpainted is one of my favorite sock yarns, and I’m excited that it now comes in semi-solids.

Next time I’ll show you how I took on an Estonian stitch that looks like lotus flowers… and won. (And failed to impress upon my husband just what a badass I am.)

Lookee what came through my mail slot this evening! Happy Valentine’s Day to me! (Yes, Valentine’s Day was a little while ago now, but there was a little Paypal notification hitch that kept Tom Diak of Grafton Fibers from knowing that I wanted them back in the middle of February. He made me a set just as soon as I inquired about them.) I’ve been reading Claudia’s raves about these needles for a long time, and these gorgeous plummy pink ones were on sale for Valentine’s Day. (Go have a look at Tom’s shop — there’s an anniversary sale on right now!) I’m not usually first in line for things that are pink, but I’ll make an exception for these. And look at those points. Oooo, if I didn’t have to make pesto before marimba class I’d go cast on a sock right now. I even know just what sock it would be: Mrs. Pomatomus. Mr. Pomatomus has been a bachelor long enough, and the Pomatomi are going to match my new needles. Oh joy!

(And yes, I may have swatched for a new grey sweater. That may in fact be a plump cake of Beaverslide merino you spy in the corner of the first photo. I just couldn’t keep looking at it and not take it for a little test drive…)