Sweet Lucy - 1999ish - 2008

She loved being on the couch with her head on the pillows.


She loved chewing on her bone.


She loved us.


There won't be another like her.

Good dog, Lou.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Why am I sitting in my car for these pictures? Three reasons. First, I love my car and I don’t think it gets enough exposure in the media. I love you Volksie! Second, although I finished this sweater a month ago and I’ve worn it at least twice a week since, all through the holiday season, nobody has ever taken my picture in it. It’s a camera deflecting garment. It became clear to me that I’d have to take the pictures myself. Third, and most importantly, this sweater has some history. No staid, indoor photo shoot would do it justice.


I bought this yarn at an estate sale a few years ago. The recently departed must have been a fiber hoarder of exceptional skill. Daisy and I were disappointed when we pulled up to the house and saw people walking away with bulging lawn bags. “We’re too late!”

Turned out that we weren’t late at all. The entire yard was blanketed with tarps and boxes full of yarn of all weights, fibers and colors. We each ended up hauling away three bags of skeins, cones and half-finished projects. The woman’s daughter and her boyfriend were selling everything off so that they could afford to take care of their much-younger sister. They had no idea how much to charge for any of it. Daisy’s theory, most probably correct, is that the kids just wanted to be done with it, done with cleaning out their packrat mother’s house and the responsibilities she’d left them with, and they didn’t care if they made a fair amount of money. When I asked how much they wanted for my bags, the boyfriend said, “I dunno…thirty bucks?”

Knowing how much the nine skeins of Skye alone would cost if I paid the full US price for them, thirty bucks seemed like too much of a steal. “Look, I’ve got at least a hundred bucks worth of just one yarn at the bottom of one of the three bags. I don’t think the rest of it’s worth much, but I know how much that one yarn is worth, and I don’t want to rip you off. Can I give you $125 for the whole bunch?” I’m the worst bargainer ever. He seemed surprised, and he thanked me for my honesty, even making an exception and taking a personal check for payment. I hope those kids are O.K.

So the yarn had a story even before I started knitting with it.


I kept it in the stash, waiting for the perfect project to do justice to its provenance. Right after we moved into the new house and I saw how much yarn I really have, I gave up on thinking any of the yarn is too special to be used. I plucked it from the big bin, thumbed through my old issues of Interweave Knits, and a match was made.

This sweater got around, even before it was completed. I started it on the train to Tulare, and finished most of the back while waiting outside the Hanford Amtrak station. I knit the left half on the straight part of the road to Bass Lake for Thanksgiving. I knit the right half on the plane to Arizona for this year’s disaster recovery test. When I blocked the fronts and laid them out on towels at the hotel, I realized that I’d screwed up the right front completely, starting with the first cable cross above the ribbing. I undid the right front down to the top of the cable, dropped the cable stitches all the way down to the bottom inch of the sweater, then spent at least a couple of hours working them back up. It was still faster than reknitting the whole front. I knit one of the sleeves during the DR test, because my part of the test is about ten minutes of actual work. I seamed the body on my last night in Scottsdale.

I started the other sleeve while sitting in line at the airport. I haven’t talked much about my air travel adventure, because I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to say about it. Let’s just say that one of my coworkers isn’t a good flyer. Let’s further say that tranquilizers might have helped the situation, as they apparently did on the flight to Phoenix, but that said coworker had already taken all of them before that first flight, leaving none for the flight home. Let’s also say that telling the 109 other passengers on the plane that your manager a motherf$%ker and trying to get your coworkers to hit you so that the plane won’t take off isn’t the best way to gain sympathy for your panic attack. Neither is trying to open the door of the plane. Guess what else doesn’t work? Kicking the cockpit door so hard that things start falling off shelves in the forward galley. Finally, let’s conclude by saying that this kind of thing results in a lot of paperwork, as several local and federal agencies have to get involved to take reports on the incident. We sat at the gate for three hours. I got a lot of knitting done, in between defending wacky coworker’s manager to the other passengers and eating peanuts. (“Did his boss really say he’d be fired if he didn’t get on the plane?” “No, nothing of the sort. His boss is probably the kindest man on this plane. He offered to pay for the rental if the guy wanted to drive back to California.” “So he’s NOT a motherf$%ker?” "No, nice little lady sitting next to me, he's most definitely not a motherf$%ker.")

Exhausted from all of November’s travel excitement, the sweater and I spent the first week of December recuperating at home. I finished the neck and sewed in the arms while sitting on my couch, watching ‘Perry Mason’.


Details Section

Pattern
Sienna Cardigan from Interweave Knits – Fall 2006

Yarn and Notions
Colinette Skye in ‘Claret’. No idea how long ago this yarn was dyed, but it’s a color that isn’t produced anymore, and it’s dye lot 001. By my calculations, I used a little more than 700 yards.

I bought the buttons at JoAnn’s. When I started the sweater, they were exactly what I had in mind. I thought I’d have to wait, to put so-so buttons on until I got a chance to go to Britex or look for them at Stitches, but I wandered in to the fabric store and there they were, just enough of them on the rack for my needs. I think they cost about four bucks total.

Needles
Brittany Birch size 7, and a Clover circular needle, also a 7.

Size
Small. It was too small when I finished it and put it on for the first time, but it fit perfectly after a couple of hours of wear. Hooray! I finally learned my lesson! Knit just a tad small, because wool stretches. You’d think I’d have known that before now, but you’d be wrong. I have a closet full of sweaters that are a half size too big because I knit them to fit right off of the needles.

Time
I started it early in November, and I finished knitting it in early December. I took a break in there to knit the two-tone shrug, then came back and finished this one on December 11th.

Modifications
I wanted the sleeves to match the body, so I gave them about three inches of ribbing.

Because my yarn is pure wool rather than an alpaca blend, the sweater has a different drape. This, along with my aversion to making a sweater that would accentuate my love handles by poofing out above the ribbing, lead me to add waist shaping. I did the standard decrease every six rows five times, increase every eight rows five times thing. Yes, it still looks like the sweater is accentuating my love handles, but it's not. When laid flat, the body of the sweater curves in elegantly from the ribbing to the waist. The love handles are doing the accentuating work all on their own. Yeah, yeah. I'm working on it, alright?

Finally, I don’t know why I thought the neckline shaping should happen after a full repeat of the chart, not in the middle of it, but that’s what I did. That, combined with a couple of cable repeats that were a bit longer than they should have been, lead to the neckline being much higher than the original pattern. I had to do some guesswork to make it up to the shoulder bindoff with the right amount of stitches.

Conclusions
I love this sweater. Like I said above, I’ve worn it at least a dozen times. I think Accountant Boy must be sick of seeing it by now.



I adore the collar, and how it stands up so cleverly with just a couple of increases at each side of the nape. The picot edge isn’t even really a picot edge – it’s just smartly planned bind offs at each edge.

When I picked the yarn out of the bin, and picked the pattern, I wasn’t especially excited about the project. It was a throwaway project, something I was going to do just to say that I’d gotten something done, something I could work on while traveling. I felt that way about it when I finished it, when I first tried it on, and for the first couple of hours that I wore it. “It’s kind of…it makes me look broad…it’ll probably end up sitting in my closet…at least it’s finished…” Then I caught sight of it in a mirror, and I fell in love with it. Sometimes that happens.

Simple Joy

It's no secret to those who know me that I get too wrapped up in things. I feel as though I think about everything all of the time.

Here's a good example. I've purchased a large salmon filet for tonight's dinner. It's sitting in the refrigerator here at work. Every few minutes, I stop and think to myself, "Remember that there's salmon in the fridge!" I'd write a sticky note to myself about it, but that would lead me down the slippery slope of office supply procurement, and then I would find myself doing a rough count of the number of sheets of sticky note paper still on each of my two little pads, wondering if I should waste a note on something so simple as remembering to take dinner home. And what happens if and when I get the salmon home? We still haven't purchased a vent hood for our range, and the aroma from dinner two nights ago is still lingering in our bedroom as a result. What happens if I cook the fish and the whole house smells? I then start thinking about adding a vent hood to the kitchen, how much it will cost, how much it would cost to redo the entire kitchen, whether we should do that before replacing the inefficient windows, and how we're going to refinance both houses in order to be able to do any of this. I then start panicking about our financial situation. Maybe we shouldn't have moved. We were happy enough in our old house. Now, Daisy and Falstaff are happy in our old house. I need to get over there and clean up the yard and spray the peach tree with fungicide. I should put that on a note or a list.

All of that from a lovely salmon filet.

I'm trying to change this about myself, trying to remember that not everything has to be thought out in intricate detail. Sometimes it's good enough to let things be simple.

Lucy has this down. Lucy has very few wants. She loves food, she loves her bone, she loves being inside, and she loves us. We give her only those four things, and she's happy. We've tried over the course of her years with us to give her more. We tried to give her a nice yard, but she didn't much care for it. She wants to be in the house. We tried to teach her to play ball, but she'd only ever chase it a few times, then bring it back and lay at our feet. She wants to be with us, not running away from us to chase a ball. We tried to give her more elaborate, less tooth-wearing toys, but she'd ignore them in favor of frantically searching for her bone. In short, if we feed her and then let her inside to sit next to us and chew on her bone, she's good. She wants nothing more. She has no ulterior motives, no plans or schemes. She is simply happy.


The other day, while Accountant Boy was online looking at cars, I had an urge to knit and nothing in particular on the needles. I'd swatched for a sweater, but then I was going to have to find the pattern, and adjust for some differences in gauge, and then what if I didn't have the right circular needles, and...too much stress. Wasn't knitting fun for me at one point? When did it become another thing to worry over?

I wandered into the garage and opened one of the stash bins, the bin that has all of the single skeins. I thought about how I needed to reorganize all of the bins, and that thought sent me spinning down the path of reorganizing the whole garage, even though it was near midnight and below freezing. "No! Just stick your hand in and pick one!" I said to myself. I came up with a skein of Berroco Chinchilla Colors in 'Tuscany'. I'd bought it, along with other yarn that I don't exactly remember, from Webs. I only had the one skein, and it was probably four years old. There wouldn't be more of it. I stood there with it in my hand, debating between using it and waiting until I had the right yarn for the body of a sweater so that I could use the Chinchilla for the collar, even though I have no thoughts of wanting a multicolored faux-fur collared sweater.


I shook myself out of my daze of thoughts and left the garage. I plucked a pair of size 13 needles out of the pretty jar that Daisy gave to me a couple of years ago. I sat cross-legged on the chaise with my one ball of yarn and my big needles. After a couple of test cast-ons to see how wide my scarf would be, I started knitting.

It was soothing, the sound of the wooden needles tapping together, the rhythmic sweeping as they slid past each other. I watched with interest as the colors linked together from row to row. I kept stopping to tug on the material to see how it was going to look, and grinning gleefully at the plush furrows. It was only ten stitches wide. There was no way to mess it up, no pattern to follow, no deadline for completion. It was just fun. I'd forgotten how much fun it could be.

I don't know how long it took to finish, maybe two or three hours. By the time we left the house the next day, I was wearing it.

It's stretched quite a bit, making it much narrower and quite a bit longer than I'd thought it would be. I don't care. I wrap it around my neck three or four times and wear it anyway. Marvel at how good it looks with my abstract Korean art.


Feeling inspired by my new outlook on knitting, I went back into the bins and came up with four balls of sock yarn from Interlacements. According to Clayton, there wasn't enough twist for it to be used for socks. I bought it two Stitches ago, intending to make a Clapotis from it. Then I threw it in the stash and kept coming up with impractical alternatives involving doubling it with a solid sock yarn and making a sweater from it.


The Hell with that noise. It's time for that yarn to be something other than a complicated thought in my head. It's coming along nicely, I think.

I'm not making formal resolutions this year, because they'd only end up as more worries on my mind. I'm simply going to try to follow my little mantra. Less thinking, more doing. Less planning, more living.

Frosty Likes to Watch

I, uh, I dunno. I came home from work, and this was waiting for me as I strolled up the walk. I don't know who did this, and I don't know why. All I know is that it was awesome.

Best. Neighbors. EVER.

Alizarin

Aunt Karen: "Weren't you wearing something different at the wedding?"

SuzannaBanana: "Well, yeah, but we don't get out much. If I don't change dresses every three hours, I won't ever get a chance to wear half of them."

Aunt Karen: "How many dresses do you have?"

SuzannaBanana: "Two. So now, you know, problem solved! See? I'm all about the solution-oriented approach. I made this little shrug, too. Finished it five minutes ago. I deliver on my deadlines."

Aunt Karen: "What? You looking for a job or something?"

SuzannaBanana: "It never hurts to practice the lingo."

This is the two-tone shrug from Fitted Knits, rendered in a single, lovely alizarin tone. We didn't have a good camera with us that night, so this is the only halfway decent photo of me wearing it that I have.



Easy Details Section:

Pattern: Two-Tone Shrug from Fitted Knits.

Yarn: Berroco Softwist in Alizarin - a few grams more than four skeins.

Needles: Brittany birch straight #6 for the body, Addi Turbo #2 for the sleeve ribbing, Crystal Palace bamboo #3 for the body ribbing.

Size: The fourth size from the left - I think that's the 16". It's the same size as the sample at FashionKnit, which fit like a dream, so I figured I couldn't go too wrong with knitting mine in that size.

Time: I started knitting it on Sunday, December 2nd. I finished it at 4:55 p.m. on December 8th, exactly five minutes before my parents' wedding reception started. That's when I pulled it over my shoulders and turned down the collar. Technically, I didn't finish it until December 14th, when I wove in all of the ends. On the night of the party, I only had time to put it on and shove all of the tails back up into my sleeves.

Modifications: None. I might be missing a row or two at the very edge of the ribbing, but I was working under a time crunch, and I knew I didn't have twenty more minutes to work another two rounds. So, while it might be an eighth of an inch missing from the body, there are no intentional mods. I bound off in the ribbing pattern, which I don't think was a part of the instructions.

I know there have been some questions about how to measure for this pattern. I know because I had these questions myself, and when I went traipsing about the Internet for the answers, nobody had a definitive one. I measured from the outer tip of one shoulder to the outer tip of the other. If you press your finger against your shoulder and find the bony edge, that's what I'm talking about. I measured across the front, because the position of my arms threw off the measurements when I tried to measure across the back. I was measuring without the aid of an assistant that night. When three out of four measuring attempts got me the same number, and that number matched the size of the finished shrug that I'd tried on, I figured I was good to go.



I love how Softwist makes a more dressy garment without too much effort. I know it's a splitty yarn, but I'm a fairly loose knitter, so I didn't have a problem getting the needles all the way under the stitches.

What'd I learn from it? I learned how deep I like the armholes to be on top-down sweaters. I always screw up this part because I second-guess my measurements at the try-on point. In this case, I figured I didn't have time to go back and fix a mistake anyway, so I divided for the arms when the pattern told me to, and I just went for it. I'll be able to use this shrug as a guide for future sweaters.

This was a fun knit. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been in such a hurry to complete it. Someone out there in cyberspace said that knitting the ribbing was a demoralizing experience, and I'd tend to agree. I finished the body and the sleeves in only a few hours, lulling me into a false sense of confidence. I thought I'd be done well before the party. I didn't imagine that I'd be shouting, "Hold on! I have to bind off fifty more stitches!" as Accountant Boy tried to drag me to the car.

Will I wear it again? I knit it to go with a black velvet dress, but it'd look just as good over a summer tank with jeans. It did look so cute that night. Unfortunately, I'd had the flu for the two weeks prior, and I'd lost several pounds as a result of not eating and taking hefty amounts of Sudafed. The minute the cold went away, I put the weight back on. It's not so cute at the moment. It is not a garment for the fat of back.

Still, it's done and it's lovely and I'm proud of it.

I've been on a real tear lately with the knitting. I've finished Sienna as well, but that's a story for another day.