It feels like a long time since there’s been a finished piece of knitting to show off here, and I’m afraid today is not the day we’re breaking the pattern. The Emily sweater has been warmly received in New York, and I’ve made my brother swear to photograph his lovely wife attired in it for the blog, but they are busy people and I don’t know when I’ll see these pictures. I’ve been cruising on some other projects that haven’t gotten much exposure here yet, though. Let’s look at the Three and One progress, shall we?

This one continues to be easy to knit without much concentration, so during last night’s Portland v. Houston basketball throw-down I finished the 3×1 ribbed waist and went back up to my size 8 needles to continue up the torso. Shaping accomplished, I hope. I also thought to sprinkle in a dash of color during the ribs; I started to wonder if it would look funny to have a big expanse of neutral in the middle if Mum wanted to wear it without a belt, and then it occurred to me that I might as well just knit in the appearance of a belt and maybe skip the belt knitting altogether. The fifth-color red is going to appear at the shoulder and sleeve joins and possibly in the button bands but not in the main motifs, so I thought it might balance the whole garment a bit to use it at the waist. My mother doesn’t need it, but I deployed the strong red and the brown at the natural waist also for a slimming effect. (This works in my head, anyway—we’ll see about real life later on.)

Alas, beyond the chair in this picture you can just glimpse the season’s first garden carnage. Oh, fie. Oh, spite. This is not what I needed to discover on a day that has already been tedious and trying. Here you may spy the culprit who has thoroughly trampled and beheaded every one of my tulips just before they were ready to bloom:

This did not happen on my watch. Regrettably, other members of the family think it is “cute” when the dog gambols through the flower beds snapping at invisible flying insects. Said members felt my wrath when this was allowed to happen last year and seem to have totally forgotten the experience. Surely it is only fair if those who choose not to monitor and contain the canine exuberance are assigned procurement duties for fencing materials? Unless they would rather we paved the back yard and had nothing growing at all?

Meanwhile, I shall take a deep breath and look up.

For Easter has arrived and with it a respite from the Holy Week choral marathon! After singing five services in four days and being stuffed with Easter dinner at the in-laws’, I was good for very little last evening. Rain was coming down in torrents, so it was time to get cozy indoors. I swapped my lacy tights and heels for a comfy pair of handknit wool socks and my dressy Easter clothes for yoga pants and a sweatshirt, pulled my favorite Welsh wool blanket (a wedding present from my cousins in Maine) out of the bureau drawer and snuggled up on the couch with my cat, some knitting, and the third season of All Creatures Great and Small. I thought about working on this:

But it requires too much brain power. That’s the beginning of my Cocoon-Stitch Half-Circle shawl in the Toots LeBlanc angora/merino, and I’m pleased as punch with how it looks and how it feels… softer and deliciously softer as the yarn passes through my fingers and the angora halo blooms. But the pattern is written out line by line and I haven’t memorized what happens between the “cocoons” and the increases yet.

So I picked up my newest project: the Three in One cardigan for my mother, which I cast on Wednesday (which feels like a month ago) at the Close Knit knitting night. I put on my 184 stitches and got started, then remembered I was planning to work continuous garter-stitch hem/button bands with mitered corners for a nice, finished look after I steek… a nice, finished look that was going to require the forethought of a provisional cast-on. Oops. Tracy lent me her crochet hook and reminded me how easy it is to do a provisional cast-on using the hook to draw loops over your needle. I am the world’s clumsiest person with a crochet hook. (As Tracy tactfully put it, “Hmmm, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone carry the yarn in the right hand for crochet.”) I can steam away with two needles at lace, cables, travelling stitches, short rows, you name it… but Galapagos finches can manipulate their insect-extracting twigs with considerably more dexterity than I can muster in wielding a crochet hook. But after a while I developed a sort of left-handed throw that was more or less efficient, and the advantage of the crochet-hook method is that I think I’ll be able to remember how to do it next time, whereas I always have to look up video tutorials of the methods I’ve tried before.

The Three and One turns out to be blissfully brainless colorwork, premium for watching Little Dorrit on Masterpiece Theatre. (I haven’t read this particular Dickens and it’s seriously stretching my attention to figure out what is going on with the truly creepy French guy and some of the other murky fringe characters who are obviously tied into the Dorrits’ and Clenhams’ murky history in some murky, confusing way. I think murky may in fact be the definitive adjective for a Dickens plot. But boy am I looking forward to the romantic payoff when Amy and Arthur finally get together. End tangent.) I’m doing the “Pheasant’s Plumage” version with the purl stitches. The major design dilemma is this: Mom wants some waist shaping. I can’t add it by decreasing without disrupting the three-and-one pattern. (Well, I could–there’s an occasional single-color plain round that would allow for subtracting multiples of four invisibly–but the vertical alignment of the motifs would be thrown off OR, if I bunched the decreases, I’d have potentially unflattering stair-steps at the side “seam.”) If it were for me, I’d throw in an extra design element: a band of about 4″ of ribbing to draw the sweater in at the natural waist in the oatmealy background color. This would echo the shawl collar I’m already planning to add (Mum and I both have slender necks that make the rest of us cold if left exposed) and the ribbed cuffs and might, with the addition of a tie-on belt using some of the contrast colors, give the sweater kind of a rad Starsky and Hutch vibe. But I don’t think my mother owns any belted cardigans, and if the belt of her bathrobe is anything to judge by, I might just be knitting puppy bait. Because apparently

fabric belt : Labrador

as

thumb : toddler

or

Coors Light : my brother-in-law.

All’s just right with the world when the two meet at the lips, you know? And also I’m fairly sure my mother has never seen Starsky and Hutch, original or remake.

So I’m delaying the decision until I can put the question to Mum, and meanwhile I’m angling in for some subtle shaping by going down a needle size now that I’m about 3″ in. (Mum, if you read this post before I see you next weekend, leave your preference in the Comments, okay?) Any advice for me, wise readers? Solutions I haven’t thought of? What do you like to do with colorwork patterns and decreases?

*Post title courtesy of William Byrd’s delightful but tricky setting of this psalm:

Sing joyfully to God our strength; sing loud unto the God of Jacob!

Take the song, bring forth the timbrel, the pleasant harp, and the viol.

Blow the trumpet in the new moon, even in the time appointed, and at our feast day.

For this is a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob.

I like the bit with the trumpet and the new moon.

So that’s what a road bike feels like.

I ride a sweet little cruiser (mine’s more like the men’s version at right), as you know if you’ve read here for a while. I love her; she’s so stylish and just the thing for commuting around town. But of course I knew there was more to be had from the cycling experience. I’m an avid watcher of pro cycling and I’ve seen those svelte featherweight machines that let you go cranking up the Alps or the Pyrenees like a goat. This week I finally got to try an honest-to-goodness road bike, my neighbor’s 1992 Serotta… which she just happens to be fixing up to sell. (It just happens to fit me, too.)

This bike has seen many, many tour miles, and she’s that particular shade of raspberry that was popular in 1992 (my mother has a ski parka of the same vintage that would totally match). It took me a few passes up and down the street to get comfortable changing her gears and getting my feet into the toe-clips (my neighbors know I don’t have special clippy shoes and were kind enough to change out the pedals for me). Then we were off and away on an Airport Loop (which is the 17- or 18-mile ride you do to blow off steam after work if you live in NE Portland), right up the ridge behind our houses, so smoothly I didn’t have to stand up on the pedals and wasn’t even breathing hard at the top.

Our neighbor gave me pointers to better position myself on the bike and had me practice dropping my hands and shifting my weight back to descend more safely. I learned how to trim the gears with the front derailleur. We took the speed bumps in the neighborhood streets like cavaletti. And wheeeeeee! we flew down the highway ramp to take the road to the river.

Today was beautiful, so Mr. G and I went out again, this time into a stiff headwind along the Columbia, so I got to practice “sucking his wheel,” which I swear is nothing dirty… especially when it’s consensual. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Knitting! Yes, I still do it. No updates of late because I’ve been finishing some gifties and slogging away with some garter stitch that wouldn’t make for very interesting pictures. But I’ve got a Tomten worked almost up to the shoulders, and it just might come out big enough to fit a kid who’s been outgrowing my efforts faster than I can finish them since he was born. And the nephew has been in his February jacket and drooled in approval, although it’s still pretty big for him, and his mother was kind enough to refer to it as “the best sweater in the world.” Awww.

I promise content more interesting to the knitterati soon, if I can just survive the combined pressure of Holy Week choir singing and the need to get the big project I’ve been writing-editing-designing all year for my school ready for the printers by next week.

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.