What a Life!

Friday night I wanted so badly to wear my new sweater, but alas! no matter what I took off – socks, shirt underneath my sweater – it was to no avail. It was simply too warm to wear it.

Saturday we had a high of 67. Steve took Ben to the Husker’s baseball game, and Joey and I stayed home. Joey napped and I got some time to myself. Then after he woke up, I let him wander around the back yard while I visited with my sister.

Last night it was so warm, I wore my short sleeved pajamas to bed. I turned on the electric blanket, but only for a bit. In the middle of the night, I turned it off. It was simply too warm.

This morning, it was warm and there was a strong wind from the south. Shortly after 7:00, I decided to go for a walk. I had my jacket on when I went outside the house, but I left it in the porch after I put on my shoes. My workout pants and a long-sleeved shirt were all I needed.

But while we were at church, the weather changed. It got cold and windy, and the clouds took over the sun. This afternoon, we had mammoth snowflakes falling to the ground. They were like little clumps of snow, falling from the sky.

Now this evening, I am wearing my new sweater once again. It feels so good. It’s one of the [few] things I like about cold weather.

It’s hard to believe, just a week ago, we were somewhere where we were wearing short sleeve shirts and watching parades. Almost makes me believe in reincarnation. Almost.

In my parents living room are a couple of occasional chairs with footstools. To Joey, however, they were an great opportunity to entertain.

Start out between the chair and the stool so you can put your feet on the chair and push in order to get up on the stool.

There you go.

Stand up now.

Clap and cheer to celebrate your success!

I’m telling you, it was funnier than you could ever imagine.

It is so good to be home.

I mean, I love my parents dearly, but their lifestyle is so different from ours. They’re always on the go. I don’t think Joey got a single nap while we were there, other than sleeping in his carseat or in someone’s arms while we were doing something, which doesn’t really count as a good nap.

On the plane on the way back, he was more than the Energizer Bunny – he just wouldn’t quit – and I could tell he was absolutely exhausted. We got home, and I thought he would be happy to run around and play, but he just was upset about everything. I put him to bed shortly after 6:00 – an hour and a half before his normal bedtime.

He slept until I went to bed – which was earlier than I would like to admit – and then he got up every half hour until 11-something when I got upset at him and gave him a little lecture that we were at home now and he was supposed to stay in his bed and sleep. I filled his little tummy, then put him to bed. He only got up twice more – at 2 and at 5 – so apparently my little lecture worked.

Today we are staying home. Nevermind that the pantry is practically empty and we need basics like milk and bread. We are staying at home, and the boys are going to sleep as long as they want. [Even Ben was grumpy last night.]

I remember as a teenager, visiting my friend Sara when I came home on leave from school. Her parents had a house on the river, and they would just go there and relax and do nothing all weekend. I just loved that. I always felt so refreshed after spending a weekend with them. It was so completely different from how my family operated.

Then there were a couple times, once I had my driver’s license (after I graduated from high school and lived far away from home that my parents didn’t have to pay extra for insurance since I didn’t have a car), I told my parents I would come to church on my own, and then I stayed home and didn’t show up at church. God knows, they probably thought I was trying to get out of church, and maybe I was, a little. But it was mostly my intense longing to get away and have some downtime. They were always on the go, and after being home for a few days, I always felt like I was going to lose my sanity.

I love my parents dearly, and I know they are involved in lots of activities which they love. I am not being critical of their lifestyle – I’m just saying, it so ain’t for me. It’s so nice to be home where I can do Nothing for as long as I want.

My goal is to get some pictures of our vacation up on Flickr today. I got some treasures.

My Hemlock Ring Blanket is on row 71. But I’ve used less yarn than I expected, so I may go a little further, out of fear that my finished object will be smaller than I anticipated, and I won’t be happy with it. [I wouldn’t mind if it was a little bigger anyway.] We’ll see. Those long 300+ stitch rounds are not as bad as I had thought they might be, and I was actually worried that I might run out of knitting to do while we were gone, so I didn’t pick it up and work on it as much as I could have. I am sure it will be finished soon – working on it will be part of doing Nothing today.

More about our trip in upcoming posts. We had loads of fun. For now, though, I will be doing Nothing for a little while.

Yesterday we went to the zoo instead of Disney due to the chance of rain. [We will go to Disney on Monday now.] Today was our day to be homebodies. Mom and I have finished cooking, and Dad, Steve and Ben are at a classic car shoe. Joey is asleep. The only sounds I hear are the dishwasher (much quieter than ours) and the sound of Mom putting away dishes.

As I was laying in bed Wednesday night, I listened to the quiet. I never thought of the house I grew up in as being quiet, but apparently it is quieter than ours. Perhaps it is the cement floors rather than wood floors which betray your every step, even when you try to skate in socked feet. Maybe it’s the lack of blustery wind. I don’t know. But it sure seems quiet here.

I must say, I am enjoying it immensely.

I’ve worked through row 57 of my Hemlock Ring Blanket. Out of 87 rows. Only 216 stitches on the needle at the moment. There will be 376 when I get ready to work row 87. So I am not as far along as it might sound.

I may choose to work more rows, simply because I have the yarn, and I don’t like having leftover yarn. Going to row 87 supposedly results in a blanket just shy of 4 feet in diameter. A tad larger might be nice. But I won’t know until I get there.

For now, I am past the complicated part. There are three rows of plain stockinette followed by one row of simple patterning. Great for knitting and socializing, right?

Which side do you like better – left or right? Do you see why finishing is so much fun? Results, baby. Results!

And this one’s really rolling. I tried a few different seaming ideas, and settled on the best one fairly quickly. It’s flying.

Finishing is so fun, it makes you feel like you just had a big cup of coffee when you’re not used to drinking caffeine. Which makes you crave a cup of coffee. Just one cup of coffee. But you know if you drank one, you would be bouncing off the walls so much there would be no knitting going on. Or anything else useful, for that matter. Just the same, I am sorely tempted.

It’s taking every bit of self-control I have not to pick this up and finish it. Ach! But I have laundry to do. And packing.

Did I mention we’re headed to Florida? Where it’s going to be 80 degrees when we get off the plane? I honestly have no idea what the boys are going to wear. Hopefully I can dig up some old short sleeve shirts of Ben’s for Joey. And hopefully Ben’s short sleeve shirts from last summer still fit. [Maybe laundry isn’t so important after all. No, I hate coming home to dirty laundry…and almost finished knitting projects.]

Ben talked to my dad this morning on the phone. Grandpa told him that we would see them tomorrow when we get off the plane. Ben has had two pressing questions ever since that conversation:

Who is going to drive the plane?

He wanted to know who was going to drive the plane: Mommy or Daddy. I told him neither of us – that we would all be riding, and the pilots would fly the plane. Now he just keeps asking who is going to be the pilot. Telling him that we will find out tomorrow when we get on the plane is not a good enough answer.

The other pressing question: What color is the airplane?

This one I can answer – blue and orange – I even showed him on the website – but also not good enough. If I ask him what color he thinks the plane is going to be, he says, “Blue and white.” And he keeps asking.

Such pressing issues.

But hey, you know the benefit of traveling with small children: You get to pre-board, and when everyone else gets on the plane, they try to find seats as far away from you as possible.

[I’m just trying to be positive, okay?]

Enough now. I have knitting packing to do.

I’ve said before, I love finishing knitting projects. You take these separate pieces that are pretty but really nothing by themselves, seam them together and create this single beautiful object. It takes days to knit the individual pieces, but in a matter of hours, you can turn it from a pile of pieces into a glorious finished project.

But now I’m thinking that the reason why so many knitters get stuck at this phase – and so many projects get abandoned when they need only a few more hours work – is because finishing is different than knitting. Yes, it plods along when you get going on a particular seam.

I would say the level of difficulty, though, is on par with designing. It isn’t just seaming it together. You have to decide which seam to use, and which stitches to work together at each step. Nothing you do occurs without a lot of thought. You must be very deliberate, and you must not I’m telling you, it’s intense.

Not that I don’t like it. I’m just saying…it’s intense.

Take the Cabled Cardigan, for instance. This is what it looked like back in December.

I had blocked it and done most of the seaming, but once I tried it on, I decided that the blocking I had done was not adequate. I had just laid the pieces out the way I thought they looked good and left them at that. I should have measured them, because when I tried it on, it was too small. And the method of seaming I was using did not create seams that were elastic enough.

So it waited about two months before I blocked it again. Then I ran out of pins when I had blocked the body so the sleeves had to wait. I read an article in Interweave Knits Spring 2008 about finishing. It discusses what order you should do all the finishing steps in suggested doing the collar and buttonbands before sewing on the sleeves – you have less bulk to deal with as you work. I took that advice and did the collar and buttonband this weekend while the sleeves were blocking.

Here it is now, ready for the sleeves and final seaming.

I must confess, I’ve come up with a different idea for the seaming than I used previously, and I’m chomping at the bit to get it done.

In the mean time, I have finished Notre Dame de Grace – my pullover for keeping me warm in the evenings when I knit and work. (Yes, that is what I am modeling in the photograph at the beginning of this post.)

The finishing on it, too, was a major engineering feat. At first, I thought I would knit the collar and attach it at the same time, but I decided that wasn’t working. So I made the collar and then seamed it. The designer had you leave the back stitches on the needle rather than binding them off. I don’t know what you would call my seam, but I worked it so those live sts became purl stitches as I attached it to the stitches along the edge of the collar. You can see it here.

If you’re looking at the picture wondering where the seam is, good – you’re not supposed to be able to know where it is. If you’ve knit this project, you know where it is and you can appreciate what I am talking about. Bottom line, it’s an amazing piece of engineering, if I dare say so myself.

Here’s another take of the finished product.

Forgive the soft focus in those self-portraits. After I downloaded my initial photos, I went back and made adjustments to my settings (and put on my wedding rings and some lipstick). But I was never again able to get a picture of myself that didn’t look dumb. The joy of self-portraits…

Initially I knit it with standard ease and straight sides, thinking it would be a nice oversize sweater. But then I started over and I knit it to fit me with very little, if any, ease. I’m so glad I did – even though I blocked it exactly to size, it has plenty of room. In fact, I think I could even nurse in it without any problems, which I was not expecting to be able to do.

The sleeves are quite long. I made them a bit longer than I did on Salt Peanuts. Those sleeves fit just right when I started wearing the sweater, but the more I wear it, the shorter they get. They aren’t too short, but I wouldn’t mind if they were longer.

On Notre Dame de Grace, I wanted the sleeves to cover my wrists even when my elbows are bent while I am working on my computer or knitting. The shoulders came out a little wider than I had intended – I think the collar’s width and design makes the shoulders spread more than usual – so they’re even longer than I intended. But the sleeve length is perfect.

If the sun wasn’t shining into the living room, I would be wearing it right now. I made it to be my relaxing sweater, though. You know, then one where you just put it on and your frame of mind changes. So I really need to save it for those times when I can let my hair down and not worry about what two little boys are doing. Oh, the life of a mother!

Now, hopefully, I shall be warm again. My dad sent us an electric blanket as an early birthday gift for both of us. I must confess, I’ve been going to bed much too early in the evening because I am too cold to think, and my bed is so nice and warm. Now perhaps I can stay up and get more done. Because that’s what life is all about, right?

Next new project: the Hemlock Ring Blanket using the same yarn I used to knit Notre Dame de Grace. It shall be my travel project for our upcoming trip to Florida, a la Elizabeth Zimmerman and her July project in the Knitter’s Almanac.

Traditionally, I take socks as my on the road knitting project. They’re small, and they take a long time, so they are a very economical use of space. But dpns with a one-year-old on a plane? I think not. This project may be larger, but it is done on circular needles and thus will still be confined to my lap.

Somehow I don’t think I’ll get much work done on it except when we’re driving. With Joey, it’s all hands on deck unless he’s asleep or strapped in his car set. And we didn’t buy him a plane ticket. So unless he falls asleep on Steve’s lap, there shall be no knitting on the plane for me. Ah, the joys of motherhood.