in which I try not to whine and ALMOST succeed

I've been doing way more thinking about knitting than actual knitting of late. I thought I would be doing more in the middle of the night what with the insomnia and everything, but it turns out that it's very difficult for me to sit still unless the room is dark and I'm intentionally doing some kind of meditation exercise (more about that here on my other blog). It's a sad state of affairs because there are so many things I'm just itching (literally, ha ha...oh GOD I hate the last part of pregnancy SO MUCH) to make.

Like these mittens, for example:



I started them at least a month ago, and it's a lovely pattern and I love the yarn (Rowam DK wool), but following the chart seems like an awful lot of work when you're as sleep-deprived as I am. Yeah, if I can't follow a chart for mittens, you can guess the state of my dissertation revisions. I DO need to finish them, though, because I really want to give them to the violinist who played so beautifully on my exit recital a couple weeks ago.

Then there's this Koolhaas hat out of some Cascade 220 I had lying around:



I think I screwed up the decreases at the top because my stitch count was way off, but I just sort of guessed at what looked right. I'm afraid if I frog a few inches of it, I'll have no idea where I am in the pattern, so it's going to stay this way. It doesn't look too bad. And yeah, it's nearly done. All I have to do is thread the end through the top and hide all of two ends and I can wear this puppy. Guess how long it's been this done? At least a week. Maybe two. And dudes, it's cold outside. I need to finish it.

Lastly, an adorable project that of course I did not knit or you wouldn't see a finished version. A Christmas stocking for Daniel!





I still need to block it, actually, and I think then the fair isle parts will smooth out, but isn't it beautiful? What's more, this is my mom's first sock. Ever. She's quite an experienced knitter, and has made many beautiful garments over the years, but she's pretty much exclusive to sweaters. I remember many beloved sweaters she made me in my childhood and some real stunners she did for herself (you know that world map sweater from Vogue Knitting a million years ago? She made that!) and maybe a crocheted hat or two, but no scarves or socks or mittens. I would say I'm a less experienced knitter than she is, but I've done a wider variety of knitting. In fact - and I hope she doesn't mind that I'm sharing this - I had to help her with the short-row heel and the grafting at the end. I admit feeling a bit proud that my mom, a woman who adapts patterns all the time and tackles intarsia without the blink of an eye, a woman who hasn't needed to use a recipe for pie crust in decades, a woman who churns out gorgeous quilts all the time, had to ask me for advice on something crafty. (Of course, she cooked the turkey this Thanksgiving. God knows what would have happened if I'd been in charge of a 15-lb bird.)

Well, wouldn't you know, writing this post has inspired me to pull out the wool and get something finished. Maybe I can get that Koolhaas done before Daniel wakes up. Or pick up the aran mitten and find my place on the chart. Or start that baby sweater for my friend who's expecting the same day I am. So many possibilities...

(Or maybe I should try and get a couple more sentences revised while I still have a bit of naptime left. Sigh.)

a little show and tell

Sorry the blog went dark for a little while there. My family was here all last week, I'm really low on energy now that my due date is less than 5 weeks away, and my paper still isn't done.

But I DO have a couple things to show you!

1. Pants for the Danimal. I have been unable to find britches that fit my little boy. I've looked in about 4 different stores and they all seem to have this inexplicable black hole where they should be selling BOYS' PANTS SIZE 24 MONTHS. I am at a loss as to why I can't find anything in his size. There's plenty of stuff up to 12-18mo, and plenty of stuff starting at 2T, but he's too big for the former and too small for the latter. I got sick of driving around looking for acceptable pants, so last week, my mom and I went to Joann's, bought some corduroy and flannel, and busted out my sewing machine to make these:



...and these:



Easy, easy sewing. They're fully lined, so there were no raw edges to finish (I do have a serger, actually, but it's a pain in the tuckus to re-thread, so I was glad not to deal with it). You just cut out two fronts, two backs, slap them together, and pull elastic through the waist and presto! Pants!

2. I have raging insomnia that is making me utterly miserable, but I've found the perfect knitting project for when I'm up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, but only at about 30% brain capacity--garter stitch squares out of leftover fingering weight yarn:



These are bound for the blanket for Oliver's fund (courtesy of Kay at Mason-Dixon Knitting). If you read this blog, you've surely heard of MDK, so I'm not going to do the links. She wants the squares by this week, so I better send what I've got tomorrow. It's nice to use up leftovers AND be knitting something worthwhile.

Okay, kids, this paper isn't revising itself. Next time I'll show you my botched Koolhaas hat, half a mitten, and a Christmas stocking. Stay tuned.

giving thanks

Among the many things I am thankful for today are:

Pecan pie that my brother made (there's not much of it left):



A little boy who likes to look at knitting books:


And of course, a whole host of things I didn't take pictures of.

I hope your day was full of good food and good fellowship, too! Happy Thanksgiving.

i'm still here...

So the defense went okay. After the late night baking disaster, I chucked three dozen cinnamon-raisin sweet rolls (aka hot cross buns) into the compost (ouch), and stopped at a local bakery for chocolate croissants and pumpkin scones for my committee. These people are impervious to bribes. They ate up the baked goods, asked me questions for an hour and a half, sent me out of the room for what seemed like forever, and then told me they want some revisions before they sign my warrant. As I understand it, this is fairly typical. You give your paper to the committee, give them a few weeks to read it, then discuss revisions and such at the defense. I don't feel bad about the work I've done, and at no point did anyone say it was subpar. They even seemed to like it. But in the course of discussing my project, some ideas were thrown around about the nature of academic writing in the field of performance, and it was decided that I need to include more about this and that and the other before I turn in a final final copy.
I basically agree with this, though I admit to some frustration that I didn't receive any feedback of this nature until this week. Until Monday, all I got were a few "Yup, looks good" and "Here, I found a couple typos" and now I've got to expand the introduction and blah blah blah (and yes, I'll fix the typos).

I'm not so much discouraged as weary. Like I said, they were basically positive about what I've written so far, and I would think that someone's dissertation defense is not the place to be polite and avoid telling someone if their paper sucks. But I'm getting tired of the subject already, and it's going to be difficult for me to muster up the physical and mental strength to finish this, and finish it properly. My due date is just over six weeks away, and in some ways, it feels like my body is falling apart. I have awful insomnia, my feet itch, my back aches, my hips hurt, random muscles get twitchy, my skin is dry and sensitive, I have heartburn at night, sometimes the baby kicks me in the side so hard it hurts, and...okay, now I'm whining, so I'll stop. But you get the idea. Let's just say it's increasingly difficult for me to focus or concentrate. I experienced all this when I was pregnant with Daniel, so I was expecting it, but not all at once.

So why am I putting all this on my knitting blog? I don't know, honestly. Maybe because I was thinking the other day about knitting socks and it was the least appealing project that came to mind. Probably because of the fact that my feet feel so hot and itchy all the time I haven't worn socks for at least a week. That's right; I'm going outside in sandals when it's 32 degrees and that feels just about right to me now. Or maybe I'm posting this on my knitting blog to check in, let y'all know I'm still here, that kind of thing. Because I have been knitting, at least a little. I started some mittens and they are looking quite pretty. I've made some progress on the Koolhaas hat for me. I dug up some leftover fingering weight yarn that I'd like to knit up into 4" squares for that Oliver's blanket that they're doing over at Mason-Dixon Knitting, though I haven't started any yet.

I guess that's about it, and I don't even have pictures to show you because I've been so busy and/or tired during the day, photographing yarn and knitting just doesn't enter my mind.

Here's the up side, though. Next week is Thanksgiving, my whole immediate family will be here (parents and brother) to eat and celebrate and play with Daniel. By then my final DMA recital will be done (it's on Sunday night, and I expect it will go well....though I still have to muster up the energy and intellect to write some good program notes...ugh), and maybe I'll get some writing and some knitting done. Let's hope.

disaster

Few things are more disheartening than staying up way past midnight on the eve of your final dissertation defense to make delicious baked goods for your committee and then burning the entire batch of hot cross buns you worked so hard to make, realizing this not in time to save them but at least in time to hurriedly remove the smoke alarm and place it behind closed doors so it doesn't wake up your sleeping family.

Yeah, I think I'll be stopping by the doughnut shop tomorrow.

self-control

I have so little of it. Just when I'm thinking I should knit up at least part of the ridiculous pile of yarn I have collecting dust (well, figuratively speaking, as it's all in air-tight containers) before buying more, I have to go and fall off the wagon. In my defense, though, every purchase I've made in the last two days was absolutely necessary and intended for projects that need to be knitted up soon.

Wanna see?

First up, a couple things I picked up yesterday that will be made into thank you gifts for two fellow musicians helping me out with my exit recital. That's in less than two weeks, so chances are not good that I'll get these done by the performance date, but I can get away with giving them around Christmas, methinks.

Here is 1 skein of Cascade 220 in a gorgeous red, to be made into a Koolhaas hat:



And here are 3 skeins of Rowan DK wool in cream, to be made into Aran mittens from this book:



Next, a single skein of Twizzle, a handpainted merino/silk blend from Mountain Colors. I was at Lakeside Fibers today meeting a newspaper reporter to do an interview for a story on Madison moms who blog (she chose the location, not me, I swear). As Daniel and I were heading out to leave, he stopped to pet some of the hand painted yarn near the door. Seriously! He did not pull out the skeins and drop them on the floor or try and flush them in the toilet or get them all tangled or any manner of destructive things you might expect a nearly 2yo to do. He petted them gently and looked up at me and smiled, and as I was ogling the gorgeous colors and the beautiful skeins, I said to him, "Daniel, do you want me to make you a hat and mittens out of one of these?" He nodded. That did it. Next thing you know, I was pulling out my debit card and I came home with this:



(Of course, I could have said any number of things, like "Daniel, do you want to go to Mars and have some pizza?" and he probably would have nodded in any case. It's sort of an automatic response. This can be very confusing when one is trying to sort out what he wants to eat for lunch, but I digress.)

So, you see, I needed to buy these. I didn't have anything suitable in my stash for Aran mittens, I didn't have a good color for the Koolhaas hat (not for this particular person, anyway), and I'm sure I could dig something out to make Daniel a hat and mittens but this Mountain Colors yarn is so gorgeous I couldn't resist, especially with his green-brown eyes and blond hair. Yeah, mama's a sucker.

Moving on, then, to knitting I've actually been doing, as oppose to just planning.

Here's a Koolhaas hat pour moi out of some kind of purple heather (Cascade, again). The Addi needles I'm using are too slippery, but I don't want to buy more needles right now, so I'm just coping with it. I had a nice hat, but I gave it to my mom because 1) she was cold and 2) I kind of wanted an excuse to try this pattern for myself.



Last, the EZ tomten for AFA. I'm up to the collar. I think I'll use that brown yarn as a contrast color for the beginning of the sleeves and an edging. The color is less fecal and more chocolate in real life, trust me.



What else do I have up my sleeve? Well, I really really wanna make Glenna's new Basic Black from Magknits, for starters, but school and essential gift-knitting and the reality that I'm preggers and can't exactly check for fit right now (or for a good 6 months at least) is holding me up. In fact, I've been thinking about a few different sweaters I'd like to make myself, but it's probably better to wait. I mean, I could make something floppy and oversized, but that's not really my style. In the meantime, for many moons now I've been meaning to write up a pattern for a hat I made my husband last winter, and now that cold weather is here again, perhaps that would be a good project. If my husband will wear it, probably somebody else would. He's extremely picky.

Finished! Hokie Hat

Looky loo! I have another FO for you! In fact, this one's been done for about a week, but I'm just getting around to posting about it. I dropped a few hints in past posts, but I don't think it was hard to guess what I was making.

Behold: the Hokie Hat, resting upon an obliging squash:



Pattern: completely my own, though it's not anything to brag about particularly, as this is just your basic stocking cap with the Virginia Tech logo incorporated on the side.
Yarn: Cascade 220 in Garnet (a little less than a skein) and Orange (just a few yards...I have a LOT of orange left)
Needles: size 6 for the ribbing, size 7 for the rest
Gauge: 5 st and 7 rows/inch for the main section

A few comments about the design:
Because my brother's noggin is in Blacksburg, VA, I couldn't very well measure it for sizing, and since the hat was a surprise, I didn't want to call him and say "Hey, what's your head circumference? Purely out of curiosity..." so I just measured Stuart's head and tried the hat on him as I went (he's beyond thinking it's weird for me to stick random bits of knitting on his head when he's in the middle of emailing). Apparently, it worked out because Joe called me the other day and said he loves his new hat and it fits him perfectly and he even showed it off in his lab. This makes me proud, because you just never know when a hand-knitted item might be dorky to a muggle.

Doing the logo was fun. While my mom was here the last hellish week of dissertation writing, she found some knitters' graph paper online and printed it out for me (yay for google!) Then, she found the VT logo enlarged to the exact size I wanted (yay for google again!) and we just held the paper up to the computer screen and traced it directly. And voila, I had my chart! Because the color pattern was just one little part of the hat, I had to do intarsia, which I didn't hate nearly as much as I thought I would, though it meant I couldn't knit in the round. At least, I didn't have the patience to figure out how, so I just did the hat in one piece and sewed up the back seam.

Can you abide some more Danimal pictures? I tried putting the hat on him, and of course he pulled it off right away...and then immediately tried putting in on himself. His attempts were not so successful, but amusing nonetheless. See for yourself:






Coming later this week (assuming I get all the paperwork together for my dissertation defense next Monday, ay yi yi): progress on the EZ tomten, a Koolhaas hat for me (WIP), and the next project I'm itching to start.

Finished! Noro striped scarf

My mom's birthday was this week. I'd been planning to knit her something, but couldn't decide on anything, and then all of a sudden it was the end of October, so I needed to narrow it down to something quick, and then it dawned on me. The perfect thing: a Noro striped scarf like Jared's! I used 2 balls instead of 4, so it's a skinny scarf, but that's how I like it.

My pictures aren't great because I was in a hurry to send it off. Here's my attempt at being artsy fartsy with a bowl of apples in the Radio Flyer wagon:



Here's the scarf fanned out on the table:



And here's a close-up so you can see how the colors look.



Pattern: Really, this is pretty generic, but the idea is from Brooklyn Tweed. CO 29 stitches, work in 1x1 rib, alternating yarn every other row for all kinds of stripey goodness.
Yarn: Noro Silk Garden, I forget what shades...the labels are somewhere in the car. I picked fall colors because those are my mom's favorites.
Needles: size 8
I didn't measure gauge or do a swatch or even measure the final width and length, though I'm pretty sure it grew when I blocked it. I just wrapped it around my neck to make sure 2 skeins would make it long enough (barely).

You'd think 1x1 rib would be boring, but the changing colors kept me entertained. Maybe I'll do a wider one for myself, especially since I accidentally left my other scarf at Daniel's Kindermusik class last week. That scarf was really itchy, so I didn't cry over it or anything.

Coming soon: another FO, this time for my brother. I've left some clues in past posts...