Blue Garter hasn’t had a blog roll in a long time. Mostly that’s because there’s a wee issue somewhere in the code that causes my posts to appear below the sidebar in certain browsers, which makes me nuts. And I’m not clever enough to add a new tab at the top instead. (The power to address these issues does, of course, sleep on the other side of my bed, but asking for tech support is like poking a caged bear with a sharp stick, so I choose to live with bloggy imperfections.) But I do read a lot of knitting blogs, and several kind folks have recently given me the nod for the You Make My Day tag that’s sweeping the internets. I feel the need to pass along the niceness, and the opportunity for readers to discover something fresh and new the way I have in following others’ links. So herewith a handful of the knitterly blogs I especially appreciate.

Knitting Kninja

Kristen is the best friend I’ve never met: we bonded over our love of Lloyd Alexander’s books and only later discovered we both kept knitting blogs. Not only does she produce beautiful knits and offer her own clever patterns; she also writes formidably well and with passionate spirit. Plus she has three of the cutest kids on the planet.

Elliphantom Knits

Gorgeous knits with perfect finishing, beautiful photography, great patterns, humor – she has it all. And her little ghosty knitting elephant banner triggers my cuteness reflex every time. I want my blog to look like hers when it grows up. 

Domesticrafts

Enviable photography, Red Sox love that makes me pine for Boston even though I’ve never quite lived there, squeezable cats, and knits that inspire me because she always thinks of color combinations or unexpected details that I wouldn’t. You must see her Rambling Rose cardigan in progress.

Cranky is Good

Daphne is an excellent knitter, but there’s so much else I love about her blog – cycling, Jane Austen Masterpiece series coverage (and Jane-inspired patterns!), thoughtful commentary on the world beyond the sticks and string, mad sewing skills, and more.

The Knitting Philistine

Megan can crank out perfect handknits like nobody’s business. She also makes awesome soap that really does wake me up during my morning shower, and she’s an archaeologist, and she’s a talented photographer.

Rndnrnd We Knit

I’d like to be able to knit like this someday. Sigga Sif is always knitting exciting patterns I haven’t seen before, too. And she can take a mean photograph. Check out her galleries of finished knits.

And this is totally cheating, but Ravelry makes my day, too. Some of the best knitters I know don’t keep blogs, so it’s fabulous to have this internet agora for the craft. Long live Jess and Casey.

In other news, I’m still twiddling my thumbs waiting for some decent winter weather. Could we get just one snowfall on the east side of Portland? I’m thinking of going skiing this weekend just so I can feel the squeak and crunch of snow under my boots in the parking lot, let alone the exhilirating hiss of it under skis. I haven’t skiied on Mt. Hood since I was on the racing team in high school, and that’s a terrible state of affairs. I’m off to rummage in the basement to see if I can’t dig up all the necessary equipment.

I finally brought about the trifecta of Mr. Garter’s Christmas slippers, Mr. Garter’s feet, and the camera in a decent pool of light. These are the Saturday Morning Slippers from Kristin Spurkland’s The Knitting Man(ual), and I’m proud to say that Mr. G has been wearing them regularly since the 25th of December. The yarn is Steadfast Fibers Wonderful Wool in driftwood and groovy green above, and the Wonderful Wool driftwood carried with Green Mountain Spinnery mystery wool on the sole. The Wonderful Wool is basically Lamb’s Pride’s plant-dyed cousin from a little company in Idaho – it’s an Aran-weight wool blended with 15% mohair, and it makes excellent mittens and slippers and wears like iron. I don’t even like to think about how long it’s been in the stash, but now it’s keeping my husband’s feet nice and toasty.

This project was more of a wrassle than a knit: two strands of worsted on size 8 needles in a twisted garter stitch is enough to make your hands beg for mercy. But I fought through them, and since I wasn’t sure there was anywhere in the house I could dry a dense woolen garment in two days without the recipient finding it, I got a little creative with a toolbox and the dehumidifier in the stock room at Knit/Purl. I’m here to tell you there’s no faster way to dry your handknits than to suspend them over the dehumidifier from the handles of two hammers balanced on the fuse box. They were bone dry the next morning and ready for wrapping. It’s nice to have an option for sturdy slippers that doesn’t involve felting. And Mr. G’s pleasure in wearing them means the pain was worthwhile.

While I may be devoted to my husband, my pal Patrick recently accused me of having knitterly commitment issues. Fair enough: from where I sit I can spy the basket containing my Gee’s Bend Log Cabin blanket, my Lily-of-the-Valley corset, my Lotus Blossom shawl, and my Frost Flowers sweater. It’s been at least six months since I’ve touched a single one of them. In the mean time, I’ve cast on roughly nineteen new projects (thanks, Ravelry!). Fourteen of those are finished, five are on the needles, and I’ve flirted (meaning I swatched, which doesn’t count as casting on – it’s like first base) with two more. Mr. G will kindly cover his eyes while I tell you I sassed Patrick that commitment is for poor souls who don’t have a different tasty morsel for every night of the week.

Seriously, do you believe in monogamous relations with your knitting projects? I clearly don’t, but I think the record will show that I finish the ones I start more often than not. I crave variety is all. Last weekend I realized I wasn’t actively working on anything with a needle larger than a US #2. There’s the Trøndelag mitten on #0s, an 80-stitch sock on #0s that I can’t show you yet, and the Ivy lace stole on #2s. A hankering to knit something instantly gratifying drove me to the stash after the bulky cinnabar Perendale wool, and in two days’ time I had a cardigan up to the armpits and a sleeve ready to join it. I busted out another half a sleeve this afternoon. If I don’t run out of wool, this will be my fastest sweater ever. I’m not a big-needle gal, but the #10.5 whoppers surely do crack along! Patrick will be lucky if I don’t call it the Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am cardigan.

But just to prove that I haven’t dropped the torch, I give you Ivy stole progress:

That’s about a third of its total length, not counting the edging I get to pick up and knit with a 47″ #0. Two chart repetitions per week should leave me the whole month of April to gnash my teeth over the edging and half of May to block it with seventeen porcupines’ worth of pins. Don’t begrudge me my other liaisons will I can still get them.

Christmas in Tallinn stocking from Knitting on the Road

Hifa 2 in Currant, Ballet Pink, and Spinach

US #3 needles

A stocking for my beautiful sister-to-be. She’s more of a pink girl, so I pushed the color spectrum toward the girly side. But optical illusion is a beautiful thing – it came out looking red and white just the same! I loved the pattern, especially those little horizontal braids. I added an extra repetition of the colorwork chart for a more generous length. And I made room in the “cuff” for her name, because I like names on stockings:

Yep, I made a little goof in the R and messed up my tension trying to fix it. But overall this project went pretty quickly, and it whetted my appetite for more stranded colorwork (witness the mittens, plus another project I’ll talk about later). If I knit another of these — and given that my beloved husband ended up getting his presents in my leopard-print rubber galosh because we couldn’t find his stocking, it seems there’s need — I’ll use Hifa 3 instead. The two-ply was a little light and a little inconsistent in… I think spinners call it grist? I love me some traditional Norwegian wool, though, and the colors of the Hifa are rich and delicious. As much as I appreciate the many gorgeous luxury fibers available to knitters these days (have you looked at the ridiculous bounty of mouth-watering options available from Fleece Artist/Handmaiden alone?), I think I’d be happy to knit nothing but old-school wool for the rest of my days. What a shame that I’m forced to spend so much of my time with laceweight cashmere these days! Shed a little tear for me, friends. I vow to take a picture of the ivy lace stole this weekend.

On a whim, we went to the coast yesterday. Mr. G’s parents have a little beach house south of Lincoln City, an unassuming and somewhat mildewy little pre-fab that shudders when the washer goes on spin cycle and will someday be demolished and replaced with a sturdy and charming cottage, but a beach house nonetheless, nicely nestled on an estuary teeming with grebes, buffleheads, herons, and gulls of every stripe. Mr. G was feeling knocked about after a presentation he felt he flubbed, and I had two days off in trade for working this weekend, so we packed up the dog and a change of underwear and off we went. We got a late start, but there was light enough when we arrived to cross the footbridge and tramp over the dune to see the wild waves.

Our tough Texas pup found the ocean quite alarmingly vast, noisy, and wet. She treated us to an operatic account of her concerns, with brief intermissions to chase irresistible shreds of blowing foam. Not even a cuddle could convince her we weren’t all in mortal peril.

(Look how big she’s grown!) Once the sea was out of sight, she was her happy inquisitive self again, and we had a quiet evening of knitting, working, and snoozing by a smoky fire that snorted at Mr. G’s boyscout smarts and required near constant stoking. I’ve been knitting this mitten:

I had a hankering for some colorwork, so last Sunday I decided to cast on and reverse-engineer this mitten from a picture in this fabulous coffee-table book of Norwegian mittens that was floating around at the yarn shop last year. The book was – you guessed it – written entirely in Norwegian, which I cannot read. Not a problem, as the book is plum stuffed with thorough charts. But as luck would have it, I fell for the design on a pair for which there was no pattern. Here’s what I know about them: “Mannsvott fra Sør-Trøndelag, Trøndelag Folkemuseum, Sverresborg FTT 28549. Vottene er strikket av Bjørg Sliper fra Trondheim, til hennes svigerfar i 1946.” I’m guessing that means they’re men’s mittens from a place called Trøndelag (which I have no idea how to pronounce), and maybe the knitter was named Bjørg Sliper, and they were either knit or donated to the Folkemuseum in 1946. Maybe some of you readers can help me out here? Anyway, I was drawn to the beautiful sprigs of berries on the cuff, and to the semi-botanical design on the back of the mitten. (Terri Shea refers to those windmills of foliage as pine boughs in her excellent Selbuvotter; I don’t recognize the other elements, but I haven’t read the book cover-to-cover yet. The next pair of (equally beautiful) mittens on the page in the Norwegian book is from Selbu and uses the same berry sprigs.) And wait until you see the thumbs!

Yes, that’s a jar of Swedish cloudberry preserves modeling my mitten cuff – a cuff which was influenced by the advice of a certain Estonian, I might add – and the colors are non-traditional, and the yarn is woolen-spun Shetland, not a proper worsted Norwegian wool. This is not a strict recreation of an authentic mitten. A girl just needs a good pair of overmitts to wear to the dog park and a chance to indulge her mitten fetish, you know? But this girl also likes nerdy knitting history, so if you know anything about these patterns I’d love to hear it!