Tales of Thanksgiving

Tale 1. The hats.

Amy sent me some pics of her kids feeding chickens and wearing the hats I made. I think she wanted me to see that they were actually willing to wear them. As well she might -- they yanked them off the first time she tried to put the hats on them, and the second and the third. Later she told me that they were just being shy of dressing for me, but I admit she had to send the pics for me to completely believe it.

I was really more interested in the kids feeding the chickens. I don't think they had ever seen chickens before. It was cool.

Tale 2. The Circle.

A very short tale. Nobody came. One person came and stayed for about an hour. Other than that there was nobody but Donna, the store owner. I took some pics to show how empty it was. I assume it was just a Saturday after Thanksgiving thing. You can see the meringues I made. I don't know how it happened but at the end of the day there were only 2 left. I think the customers ate them maybe.

Tale 3. My daughter's Scarf.

I thought she did a fabulous job. This is the first thing she ever knitted. She did it at school and brought it home at Thanksgiving to show me. Extra chunky yarn and pretty big needles, from the look of it. I rarely use anything bigger than 8s and these look to be in the mid 30s. Or maybe about 13-14.

Tale 4. A Plague of Frogs.

I tried making the anemoi mittens. It is really a new and very challenging experience. I am having trouble knitting on 4 needles. 0s at that. I have frogged this thing at least 8 times so far. Finally I decided to try this on circulars. Addis. I am farther along now than the best I did on 4 dpns. We'll see.

Tale 5. Not a tale, really.

I'm going to a clergy spouse's retreat this weekend. First annual. Yoga, massage, R&R. The diocese is picking up the entire tab. I could get used to this real quick.

Braided cable scarf.

This one doesn't really show the color but it does show the pattern. Until I made this scarf I didn't think much of seed stitching. Now I've kind of warmed to it I must say.

I thought the braided cables would be kind of cool. I keep saying it -- I'm a sucker for cables.

The color in this top pic shows up a little too red -- the yarn is really light blue. You can see it much better in the second photo.


I taught my daughter to knit right before she went back to college this year -- she tells me she has a scarf knitted for someone too but I have yet to see it. I can't wait. It's really exciting to know that I'm passing something like this on.

Tomorrow I'm starting on the anemoi mittens I'm knitting for her, for Christmas I hope.

Up on the housetop

I finished my son's girlfriend's Christmas stocking tonight. This is a pattern for a stocking my siblings and I grew up with, more or less; my grandmother knitted it for us. When my kids were born my Mom knitted the same general pattern for them.

I get sad from time to time that my mom never saw me knit. In a way I'm knitting this for my mom and grandmother.

Anyway it's a third generation knitted object, and I'll be really glad to see it hanging up witht he rest of them.

Is She a Goer?

Photography. It appears to be the central skill in the blog post. Knitting and writing are perhaps distant also-rans.

It's a skill that unfortunately eludes me at present. Amy's second toddler hat, at right, refuses to to show off its cables I'm afraid. A pity I think because I'm such a sucker for cables.

I am pleased to say that the young man ran off with the hat before I had a chance to take a piccy of the finished product. Now that I'm not watching him he's willing to keep it on his head.

With any luck his sister will also develop a fondness for hers, pictured here.

My secret ingredient was two rows of K above the ribbing all the way around to give the hat more ease in flipping up the ribbing. Flipping the ribbing up can give a modest hipness to the dweebiest of hats.

BTW tonight I also made the chocolate lava cakes for tomorrow's knitting group. It's all this Belgian bittersweet chocolate and a bunch of butter and flour who knows what else. Vanilla extract I made from some vanilla beans and some brandy I've had around for a long, long time.

Hat's almost ready

This is hat # 1, pre- pom-pom. It appears to fit very snugly, but in fact it's being tried on by mom for her son. He's taking a nap at the time of this picture. We're just trying to get an approximation of the size. It was all I could do to get her to pose for the camera.

I'm sorry to say you can't see the cables very well. These are the first pics I have taken with my new camera and I'm still figuring it out. I was trying to get a size resolution since sister is getting one as well, plus I needed a decision on the pom-pom.

Here it is from the back. I really liked the yarn. Amy picked it out as I think I have mentioned before. I like this better because it hardly stripes at all, and I was not looking for a stripey hat. So the lad has one with no stripes, and the lass has one with something like stripes. The flash showed the color a little lighter and brighter than it really is -- it's a good bit denser and darker in color than what you see here.

The only other thing worth mentioning about this hat is that, yes, it's a very simple pattern but at least it's mine. I have almost totally given up using existing patterns, except for things I've already started.

Since I was a camera warrior on the loose, I went around looking for willing victims. The only one I could find was Speckles, who, having lived through two kids growing up, really is game for almost anything. So you have two of the hat, one of the cat.

None of the cat in the hat. She's not that game.

It's been too long

Too long since I had babies I guess. Amy's toddler hats were not quite as easy as I thought they'd be. Actually I had fun knitting and the first hat turned out to look very pretty, but it turned out to be a better fit for Amy's baby's baby than for Amy's baby, if you know what I mean.

So Amy and I ended up going through her house looking for hats that were too big and too little for them so I could get kind of a size palette. I have started on the one for the little boy, then I'm going to do the little girl's again, bigger this time. It wasn't a gauge problem, exactly; I just went by an estimate of their head size instead of a measurement and I was way off.

The pattern is really simple -- I'm doing it with worsted weight Encore on 24" US 8 round needles. This time around I'm casting on 96 stitches. k2 p2 around for the ribbing -- I'm doing 10 rows, then 2 rows k, just to make a little flip easy. Then it's K6 p2 around -- so it's a multiple of 8, which is how I came up with 96. Last time I did a 6-stitch cable every 12 rows on the 6 k stitches, but I think this time I'm doing cables every other section.

Amy loved the cables. I said I could do it without but she said no she really liked them. So I'm doing cables on both hats -- just really simple ones.

I'm getting a camera of my own on Monday -- so now I don't have to wait to borrow one. Soon I'll be posting lots of pics. I hope.

If I didn't mention it before, I sent Amy down to the store to pick out and buy the yarn. When she came back she said the place is "EVIL," which is Amy's way of saying it was all she could do to get out without buying half the store. And she isn't even a knitter, she just hooks.

Hats, Ducks and Cows

My friend Amy asked me if I could knit a hat and a pair of socks for each of her little ones. She has two toddlers.

Hmmmm, let me think. I could sit and watch Daily Show reruns, or . . . .


Yeah, I think I could manage that. I am, as someone at my office might say, tray excited.


I am a huge fan of malapropisms, by the way. I knew someone once who complained that she couldn’t get some gizmo to fit where it was supposed to go, so the thought she would just hit it with a mallard.

Along these same lines, a hospital nurse once explained to us in my mom's hospital room that they would be taking my mom down to the O.R. on a guernsey.

The beautiful thing especially about these barnyard malapropisms is the images they evoke. My siblings and I, needless to say, were unable to make eye contact while the nurse remained in the room. I, for one, didn’t know who would have objected more, my mom, the guernsey, or the hospital custodial staff.

Back to the hats. I have been so busy trying to fly down the knitting highway that I’ve never even bothered with a hat. So this will be a great opportunity to show a little style. Not a lot, but some. I’m thinking of just putting a little cable or braid pattern in there.

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Clotted cream?

While we’re talking about guernseys, I have spent the last few days, or part of them, trying to track down some clotted cream. I am taking a little cream tea in to the knitting group on Saturday and clotted cream is necessary to do it right.

Unfortunately, the grocery stores in this area seem to be a little confused. I’m not talking about Food Lion and Winn-Dixie here. This is Earth Fare, Harris Teeter and the Fresh Market. Not one employee, including the managers, I talked to in those stores had ever heard of clotted cream. I don’t expect all of these stores to have it in stock, but I guess I did expect one of them to have an employee somewhere who had heard of it.

Too bad, too sad.

I went to a cooking class at Rabbit & Co. last night and Katy, the owner, said she had some clotted cream. So now I have some. So now my knitting group will have some. Come on over and have some.

I Could Knit a Lace of You

And I Would Still be On My Seat

I went to visit Viktoria today at Nasse Knits, as I do almost every day. I can’t tell you what I like so much about her blog, but I really do; it’s one of my favorites. I put my very favorites on that list over there on the right, right up at the top, in no particular order.

Viktoria was having some serious gauge trouble today, and I don’t understand why, and I don’t understand how I can keep it from happening to me. As you know if you have been reading these posts, which statistically I realize you haven’t, I am pretty new at this business and I am getting kind of a reverse parallax – unknown knitting things gain size as they recede further into the unknown.

So now another thing to fear – knitting one side of a sweater and having it not match the other. To fear but not, I think, to surrender to. Ripping has become my number one knitting style. I went so far the other day as to suggest to one of the people who helped teach me to knit last spring that perhaps they should teach the tink first and the other stitches later. The tink is to me the most liberating fact of knitting life.

I am about to get this wretched scarf off my needles, and the Christmas stocking too, and then I will start on the mittens and then I will start designing a sweater I have in my head. I will not knit this one in the round, in part because I think it was a bad idea to start off that way and in part because I want to learn a new thing.