Thing 1 and thing 2 2

Finished off #2 tonight with some excellent kitchener-related advice from Astrid. I'm not much of a photographer, but fortunately that won't matter except on this blog. Here they are,

Thing 1












and Thing 2:

I'm just about to get going on the whole reason I took up knitting 4 years ago: the snowflake sweater that will be a reminder, though not an exact replica, of the one my Mom knitted for herself, and the companion one she knitted for my Dad, presumably when they were getting along. It's the one she made for herself that I grabbed when I was 16 and eventually wore out that I loved so much. My brother got my Dad's, which was a kind of forest green.

That's why I took up knitting in the first place. I can't get my Mom back but I can get the sweater. I figured out a couple of weeks ago that that sweater is probably the reason I've always loved navy and white.

Here's the hat I knitted a couple of months ago essentially as a swatch:



As I said before, I can't (yet) produce the kind of photographs I love to see in blogs and on Ravelry, but this is the hat and this is going to be the basic pattern appearance of the sweater, the RILTK.



Well oh golly I was just about to sign off when I was looking around thinking about the sweater, and I stumbled upon a piece of it on a blog. I know this is it because I have a photo of me wearing the sweater. So here is the photo


and here is the blog I found it on. Just, I don't know, for posterity.

Thing 1 and thing 2

It's all sweaters now. I did all the hats I'm going to do for the time being, except for a cousin who's asked me vaguely to consider knitting more children's hats for, you know . . .

So now there are two new sweaters, nearly identical, completed for myself and my son.
No, that's not us. You can tell because those aren't sweaters. As soon as I can find my camera-talking-to-computer cord, I will post #1, which I finished on 22 January, and #2, which I finished today except for kitchener-ing up the armpits.

I love love love this pattern because there are only these two little seams and the kitchener stitches totally hide them, besides which you wouldn't see them most of the time anyway since they're the armpits, unless, you know, you were playing basketball in them. Which, seeing as how they're very toasty, I don't recommend.

I did one for my son accidentally. Not that he doesn't deserve one, which he does, what a great person, but of course we all think that and I won't bore you with that, I'll bore you with the rest of this story. Except that the only two people I know who read this already know this story, so I won't bore THEM with it I don't think, because if I were them I wouldn't read a story I'd already heard a boring enough oral version of once already.

But the thing is, in case anyone at all has come this far, I mis-arithmeticked (the blogspot spell-checker is working overtime tonight) the sweater I was going to knit for myself because I didn't include the ease, so the boy gets that. And I get the other one, which I wore last week and it fits quite nicely.

The weather was really sweet this weekend (I don't care about sun or rain but I do so like when it gets warmer) so melting most of the remaining North Carolina mountain snow left over, in amongst my woods, from Christmas plus a similarly unusually deep snow that happened the second weekend in January.

It's not even February yet, though. We're in the middle of the period I've always referred to as the "Days of Dearth," which is January 15 to February 15. It's not that the weather is dismal, it's that the weather is dismal and the hope of spring is really not in sight. Fortunately, I now have the Kanuga Knitting & Quilting Retreat on Martin Luther King weekend, which I don't seem to be able to shut up about, and which, in addition to Thanksgiving, is really the big deal of the year for me. Except this year, of course, I'm traveling solo to Japan in June, so that may be pretty cool too.



That's no one I know, just a photo I like.

f/c

Those who know me well, and I'm fairly open with my friends, know that I have a theory for just about every incidental thing that comes along.

There's the Pez theory of anxiety, the tunnel theory of procrastination, the Chinese Boy Syndrome (a theory of guilt assumption).

One of my theories is the Theory of Deciding Whether to Eat Something that May Be Fattening. It's shortened as "f/c," which is read as "flavor to calorie ratio."

A case in point: Sour Cream-Orange Cake.

You may or may not think this sounds good. I, for one, think that anything that has a starch base and contains the word "orange" is worth committing any number of selected felonies for. Getting fatter, though, is a dicier proposition.

The Sour Cream - Orange Cake I was looking at, one of Mollie Katzen's more sinister compositions, has as its dairy ingredients a cup and a half each of butter and sour cream. This is of course not including flour, eggs and sugar. And this is all in one standard-sized cake.

Oh, did I mention the syrup?

What I'm getting to (yes, I am!) (eventually!) is that this very, very delightful food has essentially the same flavor-to-calorie ratio as tap water and celery sticks. It's not that it doesn't make you fat, it's just that it's worth it.

So there are foods that have a high f/c, such as pretzels and sushi, and low f/c, such as (for me -- no hate mail please) shortbread. I make a lot of shortbread, but I don't really eat it. It just doesn't have enough flavor in it for me to outweigh all those calories.

Forgive me please for getting off the subject of knitting and on to the subject of dessert math. I am getting close to finishing this Fair Isle sweater and if I can figure out how to take a decent photograph and post it, I will. Varian Brandon created this pattern and she's one of the best, IMHO.

If a tree

I got the shock of my life the other day.

Oh heck, I exaggerate.

I went to a knitting retreat this past weekend and heard from a friend there that she had read something on my blog. This came as something of a surprise. I had always assumed that my previous writings were going into space like radio broadcasts from the 1930s, never perishing but never to be observed again.

Blogs are, in my experience, a lot like valedictory addresses. It is difficult to write them without making them, in the end, all about oneself. Or at least it seems to be so these days. There was a day, real or imagined, when our mothers taught us not to turn the conversation to ourselves, or at least not to go on and on about this ultimately (to most people other than the speaker) uninteresting subject.

That day, I fear, has largely receded. In this blog as in so many others.

Wherefore, thank you Ann, for letting me know that someone has reached out into the cosmic recesses and read something of mine. It may, just possibly, give me the impetus to draw up to my keyboard and write again.