After spending July fussing over details and intricacies and sheer frippery in my knitting, I came home from New York wanting a project that wouldn’t require a lick of forethought, measuring, or planning… an avenue for my fingers to take over and let the piece just form itself with very little input from my brain. I wanted to freewheel for a little while. And I had just the thing in my suitcase.

I bought no yarn while I was Back East, but I did nip into Purl Patchwork. Ostensibly I was there to grab a wee giftie for my mother-in-law in thanks for puppy care while we were out of town, but naturally I couldn’t resist a little birthday present to myself. (How often does a girl turn 30, after all? You can still think of yourself as a girl after you’re 30, right?) I spent a long while sorting through all the tidy little fat quarter bundles looking for colors that reminded me of Alice, and along the way I set aside about five of them that were calling my name. They were all similar: quiet neutrals with just a shot of something brighter. I finally picked a favorite, and my heart was already hanging out a seductive vision of what it would become: a simple log cabin baby blanket with brights from my scrap bag for the “hearths.” With a hot and sticky weekend to myself when I arrived home, I quickly set to work.

I didn’t measure. I cut with scissors, willy-nilly, and didn’t even try very hard to make my strips straight. I cut each one plumper or skinnier on whim. If the squares came out a little cock-eyed, I smiled. And soon I had six. They were more or less equal in size; I added a little extra strip to a couple of them when I realized their neighbors would easily square up to 12″. Then I did pull out the rotary cutter to true them up. A nice woman at Bolt helped me find the perfect sashing, and two more evenings of sewing brought me here:

A quilt top! I just need to procure some flannel for the batting (I want this to be a very lightweight quilt, good for summer, easy to fold up and pack anywhere) and I’ll be ready to make the sandwich. It’s small enough I think I may be able to do some simple machine quilting myself. I’m thinking of eight-point stars radiating from the “hearths” out to the edges of the squares, and if you’ve got suggestions for the borders I’d like to hear them. My trusty little Husqvarna Emerald (she’s called Signy) doesn’t have any special features for quilting, but I don’t see any reason she can’t stitch some basic shapes through three layers of fabric.

The overall result isn’t nearly so quiet as I imagined it would be when I looked at that tidy little stack of beigey fabrics. It has gumption and unexpected vigor. Because I like to name things, I’m calling this quilt Satsuki, after the elder girl in Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro,” which remains near the top of my list of favorite movies. I don’t speak Japanese and don’t like to trust the Internet for these things, but what I’ve found is that Satsuki is a traditional name for the month of May and means (depending how you write it) something like “blooming moon” or “happiness/rare/hope.” I like that. I want all that for the baby this quilt will warm.

“Just as the bird’s wing evolved to fly, the human hand evolved to manipulate. An idle hand is not a happy hand.”

— Barbara Walker, 9 August 2009

“You have to put on your own oxygen mask.”

— Deborah Robson  on tending one’s craft, body and soul while meeting the demands of motherhood and a career, 9 August 2009

“Julia Child used to say you needed a well-stocked pantry in case company came by and you needed to prepare a fabulous dinner. I think you need to stock your pantry in case a good idea comes by.”

— Judith MacKenzie McCuin, whose stash weighs 6,000 pounds, on avoiding yarn-accumulation guilt, 9 August 2009

*All quotes filtered through my brain and pencil as fast as I could scribble. They may not be verbatim, but they’re pretty close.

First of all, thank you all so much for your warm embrace of Daisy Daisy! She’s flattered, and so am I. I am mulling over different possibilities to size the back shaping and will try to come up with some sensible instructions soon. Meanwhile, I’ve got other knitting that hasn’t found its way to the blog yet…

One of our reasons to travel east last month was to attend my cousin Caroline’s baby shower, the better to glimpse a bunch of relations on my mother’s side whom we’ve rarely seen since we moved back to the Northwest. Caroline is an interior designer with impeccable taste, and she’s also having a girl. All the most recent babies I’ve knit for have come with man tackle, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull out all the stops and design something really girly and adorable. So I hunted up some sock leftovers from the stash (those skeins of Dream in Color Smooshy are generous) and just kicked up my heels. The result is this sugary confection:

Sorry the photos aren’t a little better; they were taken in haste at the shower itself, since I was sewing on buttons in the airport and steam blocking in my brother’s hotel room just a few hours before! But I think you get the sense that if you were to make a big sundae of sugar & spice & everything nice, this would be the cherry on top. Pink! Picot! Scallops! Rose petals! (I actually feel a need to go read some Ernest Hemingway and knit Scratchy Man Wool just looking at it.) I opted for a sort of bubble hem because I was quickly running out of the red (that’s “In Vino Veritas,” and you might recognize it from a certain February Baby Sweater)… only about eighteen inches remained after I bound off. Here’s the back:

The rose motif (though I think of them as snowflakes) is from a chart in Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mitten book. I added the “lice” wherever there was a particularly long carry, thinking of baby toes getting snagged on the way through. Since The Baby Currently Known as Bundle doesn’t have a real name yet, I’m calling the design after her mother: Sweet Caroline. My cousin may have broken a land speed record with her thank-you note, so I can smugly report that this little top has been dubbed an heirloom and a favorite gift. Thanks, Caroline! Can’t wait to meet your little daughter!

This is my third year of crazy knitting during the Tour de France, and it seems I’m getting the hang of it. This is the first year I’ve actually underreached and not had to grit my teeth and knit like George Hincapie riding a time trial with a broken collarbone to finish my project. I’m late on the wrap-up because I took a little vacation to visit my family and other beloved people in the Northeast, but I did manage to press my husband into service for a quick photo shoot while we were waiting for a train in Reading, Massachusetts. So here’s Daisy Daisy!

Note to self: Good idea to take pictures after a transcontinental red-eye, eh, genius? Despite the fact that I look like yesterday’s toast crusts, I love this little jacket. The improvised back shaping and the set-in seamless sleeves worked out perfectly. The yarn is lovely to wear, and I’m just not bothering myself about the really obvious color change at the shoulders. I did decide the bicycle wheel/flower design on the front needed a little more punch, so while I was frittering away a couple of hours in the Long Beach airport yesterday afternoon, I revised it comme ça:

Just doubling the outer rim gave it the extra weight I wanted. All this embellishment is just me drawing loops of yarn through the fabric with a crochet hook and binding them off, by the way. I think that’s probably obvious, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’m capable of anything fancier than that when it comes to surface design. As you can see, just making a straight line stretches me somewhat. Oh, and the sweater closes with an i-cord button loop:

When all’s said and done, I needed more than 5 and a half skeins of the Louet MerLin Worsted, about 860 yards. I have learned respect for the appetite of the daisy stitch and its relatives.

If people are interested in a pattern, I am willing to work on one, but I have to tell you I’m nervous as a cat about trying to size this thing properly for anyone who isn’t built with proportions similar to mine. It would be really straightforward if it weren’t for the back shaping, which, as you can see, turned out very fitted. If your curves are closer together, you’d have to space the decreases and increases more closely from bottom to top. If they’re shallow, you’d want less shaping. If you don’t really have curves or just favor boxier silhouettes, you could scrap the shaping entirely. The beauty of knitting is that, with practice, we can learn to easily tailor designs to our own bodies, and I’d really want to encourage that for anyone knitting Daisy Daisy, but I know many aren’t comfortable working outside a pattern and as a designer who aims to please I cringe at the thought of someone following what I did and then finding it doesn’t fit her at all. I think if I do write this up it will have to be á la Zimmermann, asking knitters to do a bit of calculating to find their own best fit.

But hey! A sweater in three weeks! Let’s stop with the designer’s insecurities and open a bottle of Hendrick’s in celebration! Because it’s hot here in Portland. Apparently I missed the worst of it, but I still bought a cucumber at the farmers’ market this morning with an afternoon G&T in mind. I think it’ll go well with the sewing activity I have planned. (More on that later.)