Presenting some evidence that I can, in fact, set myself a series of goals and attain at least some of them: Blue Whale! This is the yarn and Stephen West pattern that made up the first installment of A Verb for Keeping Warm’s Pro-Verbial club, and according to Stephen it will be available to the public in April. I swore to myself that if I treated myself to club membership I’d knit each skein and pattern right away, and since Installment the Second has not yet arrived I get to pat myself on the back. I also get to give a pretty, functional gift to a dear friend. I knew as soon as I saw this murky, sea-colored yarn that it would have to be for Jen, because these are her colors.

The pattern is quite straightforward except that individual row gauge, which we all know varies wildly from knitter to knitter, affects whether or not you’ll be able to work the shawl exactly as written. If you just think of it as a patchwork of stockinet, reverse stockinet, and seed stitch and work each of those patches as you know it needs to be worked, you’ll be just fine. I also suggest the use color-coded stitch markers to remind yourself where the increases go, as you probably haven’t met with a shawl exactly this shape (it has five corners). Other than that, it’s the kind of easy knitting that won’t require you to refer to the pattern very often — perfect for tired mothers trying to squeeze in a bit of handwork after the little ones are abed!

Yeesh, those are some tired mother eyes…

I made Mr. G put it on while we did the pictures for Gridlock. At first he looked as though he doubted the manliness of a little shawl, but half an hour later I found he was still wearing it. If he mends his ways in the department of Keeping Track of Things Your Loving Wife Has Lovingly Slaved Over, I may even make him one of his own.

I hadn’t knit a hat in a good long while — I’d almost forgotten how satisfying they are. Vivian Aubrey’s snappy little Gridlock design caught my eye when she released it last month, and the timing was perfect because I needed a quick birthday present for my cousin Asa. Unfortunately, it was knit and gifted so quickly that I didn’t even get a photograph, but luckily I turned around a made a second Gridlock.

It’s Noro: Cash Iroha and Silk Garden (the colorway that also contains lavender and a splash of turquoise, but I didn’t get that far into the skein). I knit it a little bit too long. You’d think someone who’s been knitting for, what, eight years now? and has knit all kinds of lace and sweaters and designed her own stuff and whatnot could have mastered Hat Depth to Crown Shaping by now, but apparently you’d be wrong. I used to start the decreases too soon and the hats wouldn’t cover my ears, and now I seem to be over-compensating. So I’ve had to turn up the brim at the nape of the neck… here’s hoping my friend Caroline won’t mind wearing it that way, because it’s for her. Maybe I should knit more hats. Or, you know, use one of my several perfectly functional measuring tapes and start the decreases when the pattern says I should.

(I do have my next hat project picked out, though. I bought a copy of Westknits Book One today and it’s either Westward or Skinny Skid, depending whether I decide to favor myself or my husband. He’s mislaid my favorite rooster hat and his own Windschief, not to mention both pairs of gloves I’ve made for him, so I’m fairly sure he’s just not trustworthy with accessories and I should leave him to make do with whatever’s commercially available. But we definitely need more hats in the hat drawer.)

The holiday maelstrom swept us up and spat us out again two weeks later. Since I last wrote I’ve had food poisoning, a baby demanding bi-hourly night feeds for a week after the resulting drop in her milk supply, a cold, a leaky shower that may require retiling and new drywall, not to mention the usual commotion of parties and shopping and wrapping and eating… but also thirteen days of wonderful visits with family and the opportunity to squeeze my wee niece’s marshmallow-injected thighs even if I couldn’t snuggle her as I would have had I been healthy.

I finished the Tomten jacket for my nephew and gave it to him with Astrid Lindgren’s The Tomten and The Tomten and the Fox. It is far too big and will probably fit him next winter and maybe even the winter after. My pictures of it suffer sadly from lack of time, daylight, and styling genius, but some sort of documentation was necessary to prove that I finished the thing at long last…

Like how I didn’t even manage to get that sleeve unrolled all the way?
In my defense, it was coming on to rain pretty hard.
But I could have at least started with a smaller coat hanger.

The chief addition I made to Elizabeth Zimmermann’s excellent pattern was jacquard colorwork at the shoulders after Franklin Habit. Garter stitch jacquard (and I’m using the term as Montse Stanley does to describe stranded color patterning) is not difficult to do; you can work any charted design you’d use for regular stranded colorwork, except that you have to work each row of the motif twice: right to left and then left to right, so that your design reads on the garter ridges. On the wrong side there’s a pleasurable dance of the working and resting wools fore and aft to keep the strands on the inside of the sweater.

You do want to be careful about where you place this kind of patterning. I didn’t anticipate how much the jacquard portions would spread vertically, and my first attempt at shoulder decoration created a major puffed sleeve I didn’t think my nephew’s Texan father would appreciate. I had to scale down the motif to end up with just a gentle epaulet shaping. In a future Tomten I think I’ll try an even, ’round-the-hem motif and just a simple band at the shoulders, but the shaping I stumbled upon could actually be useful in an adult garment; EZ went to intricate lengths to incorporate it via short rows in Cully’s Epaulet Jacket. (She added a nice natural bend to the elbows in that design, too — can’t you just see a prettier, colorwork version of an elbow patch dressing up a tweedy jacket? It would be functional, too, as the jacquard stranding adds sturdiness…)

I also got a little fancy with the button loops. These are just short lengths of i-cord twizzled back on themselves and sewn down. They don’t have the elegant economy of EZ’s i-cord tabs or applied i-cord button loops, but I was splashing out.

So! That’s one longterm project put to bed for a cleaner slate in the new year. Now for that Helter Skelter argyle for my brother, and maybe even that wooly Manos blanket that’s been cryogenically frozen in the bottom of the workbasket for about four years… but there are always so many new projects beckoning! My mother went to Ireland this past year and couldn’t find an Aran sweater in natural brown. (The woman in the shop didn’t even believe her that sheep came in brown.) Obviously someone needs to do something about that, and a certain seminal text on Aran knitting happens to be back in print now… Na Craga’s been on my list of dream knits for years…

I’ll leave you with an appealing nephew anecdote. Background: Riley’s daycare provider was concerned that he’d feel left out because his mother requested that he drink water in his sippy cup all day rather than juice, which is what the other kids get. My sensible sister-in-law just pointed out that she could call the contents of his sippy cup “juice” and he’d be none the wiser — the little man isn’t yet two years old. So we got to the Oregon coast just after Christmas and Riley trotted over the dunes and caught sight of the pounding waves. He flung his arms wide and exclaimed, “JUICE!”

Happy 2011, everyone. I’m not making it an official resolution like Don’t Eat Vegetarian Food in Decidedly Non-Vegetarian Restaurants, but I’ll try to be in touch here more often.

We rescued this hat from the sad fate of abandonment on a sidewalk during a week of solid rain — we let it sit for a few hours after we first saw it in case the owners were backtracking for it, but it was only getting more and more sodden and forlorn. I hope we’ll run into another young family in the neighborhood who will say, “Oh, we had that same hat, but we lost it!” and I’ll be able to give it back. Meanwhile, it’s having a happy second life warming my big girl’s big head.

Want an easy-peasy thumbless mitten recipe for a baby in your life? Here you go!

Tom Thumbless Mittens

Materials:

Remnants of worsted-weight wool (I used Dream in Color Classy), maybe about 75 yards? (I asked for a kitchen scale for Christmas, so if Santa Claus comes through I’ll weigh the mitts and then give you an update on the yardage. )

US #8 dpns

Directions:

CO 28 sts and work 9 rounds in k2, p2 rib. On the 10th round, knit the knits and yo & p2tog over all purl sts but the last two. Knit 20 rounds, then decrease as given below. Rounds begin just left of center on the back of the mitt.

Rnd 1: K3, k2tog, k2, ssk, k8, k2tog, k2, ssk, k5.

Rnd 2: K2, k2tog, k2, ssk, k6, k2tog, k2, ssk, k4.

Rnd 3: K1, k2tog, k2, ssk, k4, k2tog, k1 and then divide the sts on two needles, one for the palm and one for the back of the mitt, to graft them closed. There will be one extra st on the back where you didn’t work that 4th dec; simply work those 2 sts tog as you graft.

Make a matching mate.

Twist up a mitten cord, beginning with a length of yarn about as long as your wingspan, tying a knot in the middle and looping it over a wee doorknob or picture hook or the finger of an obliging friend, then twisting the two ends together until they do not wish to twist any more. Keeping tension on the cord, pinch it at the mid point and at the ends, then relax the tension and let it twizzle up into a lovely cord of a good length for weaving in, out, in, out through the holes above the cuff and tying in a bow. Tie a knot in the end that needs it before you do any weaving, of course.  If your cord has squirrelly bits that twizzled away from the main cord, just give a few tugs on the ends and they should jump back  into place. Make another cord for the second mitt.

I’m going to pick up stitches on the inside of the cuff tops and knit a lining for each mitt for extra warmth, but for now Ada’s wearing them over those sleeves that fold over her hands.

P.S. Someone’s going to ask about Ada’s furry boots. They’re made by Robeez and I love them. I justified the splurge by giving them to Mr. G as a birthday present, but they’ve been well worth it; they are as functional as they are cute. And luckily Ada has very small feet, so they should last all winter.