Bird and Little Bird

Yarn Along (the Backup Project).

So, despite my longing glances at the mail truck each afternoon, it would seem that my yarn for the Tea Leaves sweater I'm planning to knit has still not arrived.  I'm quite positive that today is going to be the day, and that I will be able to greet my mailman with enthusiasm when he trudges up the snow covered stairs to our door. At least I hope that this is the case because stalking your mailman is probably against at least one federal law. 

Since I finished Mariam's mittens over the weekend (no photo taking opportunities are available this morning because she wore them to school today), I've had to rely on my backup project the last few days.  The Backup is actually a perfectly good project, it is just that the lovely, lovely yarn that it makes use of results in progress that is preternaturally slow.  So, as much as I am pleased with the sweater so far, I need to take breaks from it so as not to feel that I am trapped in a knitter's Myth of Sisyphus. Not to be dramatic or anything.

A couple of other little notes:

- Amanda is doing a limited second print run of the first issue of Kindred. And I say that that you should probably jump to it considering how quickly the first run sold out.

- The January Glue sale continues. Enter "twenty" at checkout for 20% off all issues.

- Stephinie is having a sale too! Check out the Gypsy Forest winter sale here.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Related articles

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).

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

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

 

I'm back! Oh, you didn't notice that I was gone? Ah. Well, I was. Just a little bit though. We drove down to Cambridge for a few days for Dan's residency interview there.  It all went decently well with the exception of trying to squish too many family members into a suspiciously small "queen" size hotel bed. That, actually, was a mess.  When I looked at my clock yesterday morning and saw that it was nearly seven, I sat upright and said outloud "Everyone. It is now seven. Can we get up now so that this night can be over?!?" They unanimously voted "yes."

 

All this is to say that I finished the mittens that I was knitting for myself, and, finding myself with a bit of extra yarn, decided to cast on a pair for Mariam as well.  It would seem that I really like knitting mittens.  It is a remarkably satisfying endeavor, even when one discovers that two right mittens have inadvertently been knitted up and there is frogging to be done. In her book, Knitting Without Tears, Elizabeth Zimmermann has this to say about the making of mittens:

Aha! Many people's sole activity in the realm of knitting.  To them I say, skip this section. You are making the very best mittens, keep right on. 

--- Eliabeth Zimmermann

Something about this makes me laugh a little every time that I see it.  But after doing some mitten knitting, I completely understand what EZ means.  So much. 

But moving on from mittens, I am hatching plans for the next knit, and thought that I might invite you all to knit along.  I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I am planning to do a Tea Leaves sweater, and a bunch of folks chimed in to say that they were thinking of doing the same.  My friend Sarah and I are going to be knitting it together and both have gotten the pattern and ordered yarn.  I ordered mine from WEBS, but it hasn't arrived yet.  So, if you think that you might like to knit a Tea Leaves cardi (or a Tiny Tea Leaves) just leave a comment here.  I'll set something up for next week where we can all see each other's blog posts about progress (or just chat here in the comments about how it is going).  Yes?

Yarning along with Ginny today...

Yarn Along (35).

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).

Yarn Along (35).

I have been doing a lot of knitting this last week. Pretty much whenever the small people are asleep, I've got the needles out and am clickety-clacking away.  The baby has been under the weather most of the last ten days and the resulting challenges to our attempts to peacefully go about business as usual have been significant.  But, I've almost got my pair of mittens finished up, and I have optimistically declared that all stuffy noses are to be absent from here by the weekend. 

In other news, which is likely to bring much less of a shock to those of you who are not me, today turns out to be my 35th birthday.  So that's something.  34 was a year that brought a lot of changes around here, what with the birth of the second child and all of that business.  But 35 promises even more change still, especially since it is looking increasingly likely that we will be packing up and heading back to California when the summer rolls around.  Or, that we will ask the magical residency match computer to send us there, anyway.  Which seems simultaneously completely insane (cost of living! residency salary!) and incredibly sensible (people we love! beaches!).  I'm starting 35 with a lot on my mind, yes, but also a sense that with big change comes the opportunity to lay your life out in front of you and decide what it should look like going forward.  And it sure is easier to have a vision of what you'd like it to be at 35 than it is at 25.  Goodness. 

Oh, and in honor of my 35th trip around our friendly neighborhood star, I'm having a big Alphabet Glue sale.  Between right this very minute and 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday night, all of Glueland is 35% off.  Just enter "birthday" at checkout.

Yarning along with Ginny today...

Related articles

Yarn Along (The Second Sleeve).

Sock Monkey.

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

Yarn Along.

Autumn in a Box.

Warm Wishes on a Long Weekend.

Some Days...

Thoughts About Very Little (and Giveaway Winners, too).

Mitten progress has been good. Which is a very nice thing to be able to report, because honestly, between a sick baby and a sniffly me, not a whole lot else has been getting done around here this week. So at least I have half a mitten to show for my days of baby fuss and failed attempts at scheduled napping.  I'll take it. 

 

And not to write one of those blog posts that is basically about nothing other than me feeling like writing a little something, but that is kind of all.  I've been knitting, the kids have been fundamentally lacking in understanding of the concept of creatures winding down and doing a little extra sleeping when it is cold and dark outside. And, we've been reading.  Mariam is rereading her stack of Tintin, I'm reading a couple of non-fiction books about famous art thefts and am delving into a mini-stack of books on various aspects of homeschooling.  The Big Move is looking like it may well be even bigger than we first anticipated, and changing our approach to Mariam's education might be a part of it all.  

Oh, and I also picked winners for the Alphabet Glue giveaway! Okay, the random number generator actually picked them, but let's say that I did it and then I can feel like I got just a little bit more accomplished this week than I actually did. I would like that. 

Robin Smith and Jenny, I'll be in touch about getting you your issues of Alphabet Glue!

Yarn Along (Mitten Weather).

As it turns out, I really could make good use of a new pair of mittens these mornings. Now, if only I had thought of this before the arrival of December and the below freezing temperatures... But I do tend to the be the sort that realizes the utlity of something after the moment when I first would benefit from having it, so I guess that it isn't any surprise that I am just now casting on for a pair of mittens for myself.

I'm using the Basic Mittens pattern from Green Mountain Spinnery, which comes highly recommended by my friend Sarah, who is my personal knitting guru.  The yarn is Fibre Company Organik, which I knew that I wanted to use, but couldn't find locally. I ended up ordering it from Mr. Yarn, and I couldn't be more excited about knitting with it.  It is just so, so soft and fluffy.  I am still working on the legwarmers (now of  non-giant proportions), but find myself a little bit distracted by the intensity of my sudden need to knit mittens. So, I'm just going to roll with it.

In other news, if you haven't had a chance to enter the giveaway in honor of the release of Volume Ten of Alphabet Glue, there is still time! And, you should definitely read through the comments on the post if you are in need of a good book to read any time soon. At press time I would estimate that there are probably about two hundred book recommendations in there. Grab a piece of paper and a pencil and head over!

Yarning along with Ginny today.

Related articles

Yarn Along (The Second Sleeve).

Yarn Along.

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

Yarn Along (Leg Warmers for Giants).

The baby socks are off the needles, blocked and ready to mail. Of course, the reality of my current life is that getting to the post office might actually present considerably greater challenges than knitting a pair of socks on tiny needles, so there is that hurdle to overcome. But nobody writes blog posts with titles like "Local Post Office Along," so I'll spare you the details.

 

 I started knitting a pair of leg warmers for the girl, but after some number of rows I began to feel that sneaky, sneaky feeling that something was not right.  I had her try on the one I was working on, and indeed, it was absolutely enormous.  And not in a "Oh, she'll grow into it" kind of a way, either.  Frog, frog, frog. 

Initially I thought that the problem was on my end, because I did have a very difficult time getting the right gauge before I casted on.  But after doing a bit more research into the matter I have happily concluded that the problem is not me after all.  The problem, actually, is that the leg warmer pattern was written for giants.  I won't tell you which pattern it is specifically, because that doesn't seem very nice, but I keep seeing it pop up all over the interwebs, so I will tell you to be careful out there.

Unless you have giants to knit for.  In which case, I have the pattern for you!

Yarning along with the always delightful Ms. Ginny today.

Related articles

Yarn Along.

Yarn Along (The Second Sleeve).

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).

Sock Monkey.

Yarn Along (A Pair of Three).

The sweater is done.  I actually finished it about a week ago, but still need to block it. Finding a pet safe location for something to dry for a few days is easier said than done around these parts, but I'm thinking that I will just clear off the top of the dryer this afternoon and set it up there.  Overall, it was a super fun knit, and I think that I will do it again in a smaller size for baby Z. when he is a little bit less on the baby side.  Maybe a 2T or so.  And, with stripes. Because I believe strongly in the importance of stripes.

 

Speaking of stripes, I made a trip to our local yarn store late last week to pick up some Spud & Chloe sweater yarn with the intention of making striped leg warmers for the girl. I'm trying to create an opportunity to teach myself how to do jogless striping.  But in a predictable turn of events, I was distracted by other things during my visit and left with some hand painted sport weight yarn to knit into baby socks.  It is pretty and soft and I could knit with it all day long. But I won't. Because there are things to cook and wash and fold and small people to chase and love and clean up after.  Written out like this, it doesn't sound all that great, but actually, its really pretty good.  Well, maybe not the folding part.

 

I did get one sock knit up earlier this week.  Pretty quickly actually. This yarn is so soft and smooth that it slides right off the needles just like that.  I lost the label almost instantly upon bringing it home, but I believe that it is this Misti Alpaca.  The socks are a gift for the newish baby girl of some dear friends, so I am likely to knit two more. Yes, two. You see, I have this decade old habit of instinctively doing a really strange cast on and although I've been working hard to retrain myself, I unknowingly did it again when I made this sock.  As a result, I'm not super happy with the tension of the stitches at the top, and may just send along a "pair" of three socks to make myself feel better about the imperfections in this first one.

Yarning along with Ginny today.

(Speaking of Ginny, did you see her post about acorn boats from Volume Nine of Alphabet Glue yesterday? Very funny.)

Yarn Along.

I'm 97% sure that I am breaking some unspoken rule of blogging by showing you this knitting project yet again.  But I'm also sure that if I actually paid attention to all those conventions about what to write about and when to write it, I would post about once a week and it would always be about cookies. And nobody really needs that.  So, yes, I'm still working away on Mariam's sweater, my intermittent year-long knit. But as you may be able to surmise from the above photo, the finish line is finally in sight.  I'm working the ribbing on the cuff of a sleeve now, and when that is finished I'll pick up stitches for the second sleeve.  I think I'll give myself a self-imposed deadline of finally finishing by the end of the week.  I will admit that I am feeling a little bit smug about the fact that I knew myself well enough to be fully aware that this "quick" knit would take me forever with my current life conditions and I therefore cast on for a size ten instead of an eight.  Ha!


Oh! And that tangled mess of sock yarn has been restored to original condition.  It is now nicely wound into a pretty little ball and ready to become socks for some tiny toes.  That was going to be up next in the project cue, but I may find myself wandering off course a bit. I have seen these.

Yarning Along with Ms. Ginny today...

 

Yarn Along.

I had decided last week that I would try to have a post ready to go for this Wednesday so that I could link up with Ginny's Yarn Along post for the week.  And, I have been working away on the sleeves of a pullover that I'm knitting for Mariam so I suppose that I could have shared that with you. But honestly, the majority of non-baby wrangling moments over the last few days were spent trying to save a skein of Cherrytree Hill sock yarn that had gotten very nearly hopelessly tangled but that I just refused to give up on. 

How, you might wonder, did this tiny disaster happen? Well, one evening while Dan was on shift at the hospital and I was trying to convince small people of the wisdom of reasonable bedtimes, the extraordinarly ornery cat retrived the ball of yarn from a high shelf and gave it to the puppy.  You can guess what happened next.

My mom was here visiting this last week, and she and I took turns working on the tangled mess until it was finally rolled back up into a tidy little ball again.  It took three days. My friend Sarah taught my mom to knit while she was here, and the speed with which my mom learned to knit away like a seasoned pro was stunning.  She got on the plane this morning with half a cowl already finished.  And, her enthusiasm inspired Mariam to ask me to teach her again, which is a moment that I have been waiting for, let me tell you. Because if there is anything that I know about my girl, it is that there isn't any point in trying to teach her something before she decides that it was her idea all along.

A Revisit.

I've been thinking a little bit lately about how many years I've been keeping this space up, and how it has become, in many ways, a family scrapbook of sorts.  Life with medical school has been challenging the last couple of weeks, and peeking back at posts from years past has proved a suprisingly good reminder that even if things don't get instantaneously easier or better, they at least get different.  And that's something. 

Then I saw today that Stephinie had a link on her blog to a post that she had written a year ago, just for the sake of fun and taking a little peek at the past.  I decided to look back at my posts from August 24th of years past as well.  It turns out that I actually had posts from this exact date from the last few years, and I thought that I would share a couple of them with you.  And actually, by some sort of happy coincidence, both of the posts from the previous two years turn out to be ones that are kind of near and dear to my little blogging heart. 

Somehow, I feel like that makes the act of reposting them less of a self-indulgent one. 

Happy Friday!

August 24th, 2011: On Knitting and Optimism

August 24, 2010: Just So You Know