Bird and Little Bird

Yarn Along (On the Swift).

Knitting progress has been, admittedly, pretty slow these last couple of weeks. The body of my Tea Leaves cardigan remains unfinished for any number of reasons. The finishing of the newest issue of Alphabet Glue, for example. Or, the strep throat thing. There's that. But honestly, I've mostly been slowed down by the need to wind a new ball of yarn to finish the body with. For those of you who are perhaps unaware as to why this would be an issue, you can catch up with this post.



But this morning, as the baby played in a basket of blocks, I decided to get out the swift and just get on with it already. Of course, the block thing was short lived, and before long, I found myself needing an additional distraction to keep Z. busy while I wound the ball of yarn. I plopped him on the kitchen floor with the following items:

1 saucepan and and accompanying lid

1/2 cup water (I know, terrible idea)

1 dishtowel

1 wooden spoon

3 dinosaur magnets

1 coffee scoop

1 large paintbrush

None of these items were used as I had intended, but they did buy me about four minutes of yarn winding peace.

 

Of course, in the end, it was necessary to settle on the above activity. Right.

Also, I suspect that over time, as Z. gets more active, this blog might just become a collection of blurry action shots of my children, who apparently never stop moving.

 

Yarning along with Ginny today. Oh, and don't forget to take a peek at yesterday's post to enter the book bundle giveaway and to find out about the newest installment of Glue.

Good luck out there.

Yarn Along (Doing Inventory).

Here is the thing about the moment when you fully realize that you will be making a long distance move with a couple of children and handful of pets: you suddenly want to get rid of everything that you own. You flashback to your days as a hippie college student when all of your belongings fit in the back of your car and you could apartment hop without actually packing more than a backpack and maybe a box or two.

So during the seemingly infrequent moments when the smallest frye is busy doing things like looking out the window at the dog in the snow, I've been trying to go through some of our stuff.

 

One of the first things that I did was to go through my yarn stash. It was a bit challenging to let go of my visions of what a particular skein might be used for, if I ever finished the three sweaters I currently have cast on. But in the end, I managed to get my stash widdled down to the yarn that I need to finish current projects, and then, of course, the small collection of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn that I like to keep just for posterity (and its singular ability to make me feel like a real knitter). It is so soft, and pretty, and I actually do like knitting socks here and there.

 

Of course it wasn't very long before my small friend discovered what I was up to and decided that he should likely be as involved as possible.

 

At which point I realized that the fact that we use baskets for so much of our storage, including all of the blocks and toys in the living room, has essentially resulted in a one-year old who believes that the sole purpose of his daily activities revolves around taking things out of baskets and throwing them. And that was the end of yarn organization time.

At least until naptime, anyway.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Oh! And today is the actual and official day: Alphabet Glue is now two years old! Thanks to you all for your enthusiasm for the birthday sale. Visit the Glue website if you'd still like to take advantage of the celebratory discount!

Yarn Along (Beware of Cat).

I was thinking that I would just skip out on the regularly scheduled programming here today, primarily due to some people choosing not to engage in adequate or timely napping and there being a whole lot of fuss and emphatic food throwing as a result. But plastic dinosaurs and guinea pigs turn out to be interesting enough to buy me a few short moments for throwing this post together before I go off to figure out why the baby is only wearing one shoe.

My Tea Leaves cardigan is coming along. I made really good progress on the body last night by- get this- sitting down and knitting for a lot of minutes in a row! Who knew? The time for picking up sleeve stitches draws nigh. Which is nothing but a good thing.

Additionally, Mariam has penned the above public service announcement and posted it on our front door. Safety first, people.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (The Other Needle).

The Tea Leaves is ongoing. As in, on and on it goes. The knitting is pleasant, and although the progress is perhaps slow, it is for various good reasons.

For one, the baby has been sick with a wicked head cold all week long. Under normal circumstances little man is super cute and hilarious and a general snuggly delight. But let us take a moment to note the absence of the word "easygoing" in the aforementioned list of adjectives. And when he isn't feeling well? Sweet Christmas gravy (as my friend Ed would say). Things go from mundane to mayhem with astonishing speed. So there's that.

But the other reason that I haven't been doing quite as much knitting, is because actually, I have been sewing. The perfect storm of pets and resident small people has resulted in the near total destruction of a couple of the slip covers for the cushions on the living room couch. I decided that rather than moping about the sad state of one of the few real pieces of furniture we own, I would remember that things are just things and make some new pillow covers. And that I would do so with cheerful resolve. Or something approximating it.

 

With our big move on the horizon, I decided that said pillows would need to be made entirely out of fabric already in my stash. Of course, I almost immediately decided that I wanted some other stuff too, so I dug through my friend Sarah's stash as well, and between the scraps that we both had, came out with a pretty good pile to work from. This first pillow is actually kind a huge mess. I am the world's laziest quilter, so the pieces are pretty wonky and a lot of the seams don't quite line up. And it turns out that this doesn't bother me all that much. One of my roomates will probably just eat it anyway.

 

I decided early on in the whole process to ditch the idea of piping and zippers. Something about those features is making the official couch pillows of particular culinary interest to the puppy, and I think it is best to just eliminate temptation. Also, the lazy thing again. This second pillow cover is a little less haphazard than the first, being an actual semblance of a log cabin quilt square. I'm hoping to finish it this evening and bring our sum total of couch pillows back to regular numbers.

In all, I think I'm reasonably happy with how the whole project is going, even if it is taking me a lot more time than I expected. And I seem to have won Mariam's approval, despite her initial declarations that something was kind of off about the whole thing. She appears to have come up with some kind of idea that real grown-ups don't generally rebuild their home decor from scraps of stuff they find in a basket under the desk.

But she is in the other room using fluorescent colored duct tape to resecure her solar system mobile to the ceiling above her bed, so she has no interior design credibility as far as I'm concerned.

Yarning along with Ginny today (well, in spirit at least).

Yarn Along (The Mending Pile).

I feel, although perhaps I am being overly sensitive to concerns about being boring, that perhaps my Tea Leaves sweater is officially in that spot where we can't really talk too much more about it until it has sleeves. Which I think will be soon, but only if I can stop falling asleep at the same time as my children in the evening. Talk about a satisfying but wholly unproductive habit. Goodness.

While working away on the new sweater, I have also been making small repairs to old, favorite sweaters. All of them cardigans, because apparently, that is my thing. The long-sleeved t-shirt plus jeans and a cardigan situation is what I'm all about. And if kids, pets and self manage to avoid getting food or dirt on said t-shirt, I will totally sleep in it too. So there. Way more than you wanted to know, yes?

I realized recently that waiting to find buttons that actually matched those that are missing on my sweaters was going to mean that I would never get around to replacing them. And knowing me, I would just wear the buttonless sweater anyway and look unkempt. So, I just started replacing missing buttons with random ones I had available, and it works fine. And gives one some small sense of productivity for having actually gotten something out of the mending pile and back into the closet.

My other favorite thing to do these days is to patch up the tiny holes that seem to be forever appearing in the sleeves of my lightweight sweaters by using a bit of patterned fabric and some double-sided fusible interfacing. It is the laziest possible version of mending something, and although it is by no means super sturdy or anything, it does make a garment servicable once more. Which is totally important if it happens to be your favorite color of blue and you don't want to give it up even though it has something like six holes in the sleeves.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Yarn Along (An Unexpected Accessory).

I finally got to the point of separating the sleeves of my Tea Leaves cardigan from the rest of the body. I always love this part because it means that now I can just knit with total mindless abandon until I get to the bottom. It makes the whole operation so much more likely to succeed when it becomes suddenly unnecessary to do things like counting things or following a stitch pattern of some kind.

I always think a little bit too hard about what color waste yarn to put the sleeve stitches on to. This is ridiculous, of course, but somehow having the right tiny flash of contrast color poking out from those stitches is nice. So I give it more attention than it deserves.

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was in the market for a yarn bowl. I have been for some number of months, but I have been feeling very persnickety about the whole affair and as a result, haven't been able to settle on one that I like well enough to have it be The One. But, this week a surprise solution appeared on the scene. A few months ago, Mariam was at a birthday party at a local pottery studio for my friend Sarah's little boy. The kids all used the wheels to make a couple of bowls each, and when I met up Sarah last week for breakfast, she had Mariam's bowls to give me, fired and glazed.

The bigger of the two bowls, as it turns out, makes a perfect yarn bowl! Mariam is on the fence about officially gifting it to me for this purpose, however, so I may have to work some kind of amazing trade. She had other plans, it seems, and was going to use the bowl as a place to house miscellaneous collectible items such as teeth reclaimed from the toothfairy, bits of beach glass, and particularly nice little sea shells. Her version of treasure.

Yarning along with Ginny today. Speaking of which, the competition for the top spot in The Homies is heating up! Voting ends today, and if you haven't yet, would you please stop in and vote for Ginny's blog, Small Things?

Yarn Along (Talking Tangles).

 

edit to add: Bird and Little Bird has just been nominated for an award in The Homies, over at Apartment Therapy. Would you pretty please visit and cast your vote for my little blog? I don't expect to even make it to the next round, but would love to get just a bit more attention for the projects that I do here (especially Alphabet Glue). Oh! And Ginny from Small Things is nominated as well. You can vote for more than one blog, so give her a thumbs up too if you can. Thanks, all!

Before I launch into my planned mini-tirade about tangled yarn and excessive pet love, can I say a quick thank you to everyone for your lovely reception of the newest issue of Alphabet Glue? I cannot even tell you all how much I appreciate all the kind words about this newest installment. Really.

In knitting news, I have made some good progress on the yoke of the Tea Leaves cardigan. That being said, there is something we need to talk about, and it is this: Madelinetosh is the nicest, most lovely, fluffiest yarn I've ever knit with, but it tangles like nobody's business when you try to wind it into a ball.

I almost have no words for the madness that ensues when I put the skein onto my swift and attempt to tame it into a knittable sphere. This latest skein took me hours to wind into a ball, and the whole time I was trying to figure out what I had done to make such an incredible mess of the whole situation. But then! But then, I put it out there on Twitter, and it turns out that the tangled Madelinetosh is A Thing. All these other folks chimed in saying that it had happened to them too, and they thought that they had done something to make it happen as well. So, I consulted The Google. And guess what? It really is a thing. And apparently knitters the world over already knew about it. But not me. No.

But when yarn is this nice, I suppose that you take a deep breath, and do some kind of curse-free mindfulness practice while you just sort it out.

 

And then, there is this guy. He has shown, almost from the beginning, a reasonable fondness for things like pets. I'm pretty sure that the dawning of a new day of Cat Love is his purpose for getting out of bed in the morning. But lately, the animal enthusiasm has reached new heights and is becoming almost problematic. Like yesterday, when we stopped to get some pet food at a local farm and yard store that happens to have a resident cat. Baby Z loved the cat, as he apparently does all cats. But he loved it so much that we had to have an epic meltdown about not being able to just climb all over said cat and snuggle it and pet it and nuzzle it indefinitely. This morning, on the way home from the farm, there was crying about not being able to touch the goats.

Believe me, I am all for enthusiasm about whatever you feel like getting enthusiastic about, but leave it to one of my kids to take it to a whole new level.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

p.s. There are still a couple of days left for the book bundle giveaway. You can enter it here.

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Yarn Along (the Backup Project).

Yarn Along (Beginning Tea Leaves).

Yarn Along (Mittens for Everyone and a Knit Along).

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (Here and There).

Yarn Along (Here and There).

I'm continuing, bit by bit, to knit away at the yoke of my Tea Leaves cardi. Progress is admittedly slow here, but I've been super busy over the last week. So much so that on Monday, around mid-day, I stopped and said aloud to myself, "Today is the busiest day." And it kind of was. But there have been some free minutes for knitting, and so I've made it about forty rows in.

pinhole viewboxes from Volume Eleven

I've also been occupied with tying up the loose ends on Volume Eleven of Alphabet Glue. I'm surprisingly close to being finished, so much so that I might even classify myself as being ahead of schedule this time around. But it never seems to make good sense to do end-of-the-week launches of a new issue, and I'm sure that there are ducks that have escaped the row, so to speak. So, I'll plan for a Monday release.

When not knitting or Gluing, I've been reading. I'm currently about three-quarters of the way through Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. It turns out to be the perfect book for me to be reading right now, and I've been enjoying every word. "Courage is fear that has said its prayers," she says. Yes, indeed.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Related articles

Yarn Along (Mittens for Everyone and a Knit Along).

Yarn Along (the Backup Project).

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (Beginning Tea Leaves).

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

Yarn Along (Beginning Tea Leaves).

After spending my free weekend moments knitting up about a billion gauge swatches (okay, more like four) I finally settled on a needle size on cast on my Tea Leaves cardigan. I think that this sweater is my first experience with such acrobatic knitting. Doubling stitches and changing needle sizes in one row, only to cut the number of stitches in half on a smaller needle just a couple of rows later. I tend to be a "begin at the beginning" and "end at the end" type of knitter, often being, I admit, overly focused on the part where I am finished and can move on to the next project that has taken up residence in my crowded brain. So it is as much to my surprise as anyone, I suppose, that I am enjoying this pattern so much.


I've been contemplating the purchase of a yarn bowl for some time now. The animal life around here has nothing if not affection for balls of yarn that have rolled off the table mid-stitch and this fact is becoming an ever-present source of consternation. The temporary fix du-jour is to put my ball of yarn into a little candle holder that we keep on the dining room table. This works well enough, but if anyone has recommendations for a simple and aesthetically pleasing ceramic or wooden yarn bowl, I would be much obliged.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Related articles

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (Mittens for Everyone and a Knit Along).

Yarn Along (the Backup Project).

Thoughts on a Friday Morning.

Thanks to all who expressed important concern about my need to have the new yarn in hand as soon as humanly possible.  I did indeed greet my mailman at the front porch, throwing open the door and yelling "My yarn!" when I saw him coming up the stairs. He did an excellent job of keeping his game face on, but I suspect that my enthusiasm was unexpected.

In other news, some people have taken a liking to spending a good deal of time at the dining room table "having a snack." This is an excellent location for extended hang-outs as far as I'm concerned because it minimizes both cat chasing and crawling into the bathroom at top speed and slamming the door before grown-ups can catch up. Everybody wins- cat included.

Also, it is zero degrees outside right now. Zero.

The Pioneer Woman has a nice post up about Ginny right now, and I would definitely recommend checking it out.  And not just because it is fun to see an Alphabet Glue project in action (the acorn boats!) on such a hugenormous website.  That is nice, of course, but nicer still is Ginny, and it is cool to see her lovely little corner of the internet being shared with a wider audience.  I think that I have mentioned this before, but Ginny and I do a good bit of emailing back and forth and really, she is just an exceptionally kind person. 

Alright, then! Off to knit a gauge swatch! Again. Remind me that I should always start at least one needle size up from the one recommended in the pattern, eh?

 

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Yarn Along (Mittens for Everyone and a Knit Along).

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (the Backup Project).

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).