What a Life!

Yesterday I cast on a new pair of socks. I’m making socks for each of my kiddos this winter, and these are for Ben.

The pattern is Sign of Four by Anne Hanson, and it is delightful to knit. The pattern is worked over 4 sts and 8 rows, so it is easily customizable for children’s sizes. Ben’s socks are worked over 52 sts (improvised), and Joey’s were worked over 48 sts (per the pattern).

The yarn is Valley Yarns Huntington which seems to be a nice sock yarn. I wanted solid colors and I wanted something with 25% nylon or rayon for reinforcement. My kids are rough on socks – you don’t know how many times I’ve caught them walking on the front sidewalk in just their socks. They will only wear these to town, but just the same, I want them to be tough.

Ben’s are in the Forest colorway while Joey’s are Navy. The Navy yarn is so dark I couldn’t knit with it at night. I’ve never had yarn like that. The Forest doesn’t seem to be quite as dark as the Navy so hopefully I won’t be limited to knitting during daylight hours with it. I have to adjust the settings on my camera to overexpose the picture in order to capture any detail with both yarns, so we’ll see.

Joey’s socks were a very quick knit. I started them on September 15 and finished them on September 24, which I think is a personal record for knitting a single pair of socks. The pattern changes every two rows, so you have a change row and an even row, and then you have 8 rows to complete one set of diamonds, so it is easy to pick up and knit two rows when you have a minute here or there and it also keeps propelling you forward to finish the next set of diamonds. Granted, the socks are knit over 48 sts rather than the usual 64 and they are shorter as well, but I think even an adult version of this pattern would go very quickly.

I have knit socks for the boys only once, using self-striping yarn and plain St st, which kept things rolling along. With the solid yarn, plain St st or even simple ribbing would bore me out of my mind. In my search for yarn, I never came across a self-patterned yarn that really grabbed me, and I like solid colors anyway. If I was to knit a pattern, I needed to have something with a short repeat so I could make custom sizes, and most sock patterns I find interesting have longer repeats and aren’t appropriate for boys anyway. Anne Hanson {Knitspot} has a great selection of socks with short repeats that are boy-appropriate, so I have a wealth of options to draw from if I decide to make this an annual tradition.

Over the weekend, this…

…turned into this.

I think they look so pretty on my toes.

And since I’m working so hard on my Florida cardigans, I thought I would wait to cast on another pair of socks until we get ready to leave on our trip.

Indeed.

Then I clicked on a certain ad of a mundane sock on Ravelry and discovered Silk Road Socks. Oh my! I don’t think there is a single pattern in that book I don’t want to knit!

Ben is studying Marco Polo and his travels this year, making this collection even more fitting.

Yomut is my hands-down favorite. But I’m thinking that Nain would look really good in some of the Quince & Co Tern yarn I have in Columbine or Sea Grass. Decisions!

{Side note: A year ago I had enough sock yarn to make eleven pairs of socks. Now I am down to just four, two of which were purchased in the last six months. Three cheers for stashbusting!}

The Yarn Harlot has been quoted to have said that when a hand-knit sock of hers gets a hole in it, she holds it over the trash can and says “Oh darn!” as she drops it in. I must confess, I join her in this sentiment.

A year ago I knit my mom a sweater for Christmas. She loved it and wore it proudly.

Then a happy little moth came along and thought it would be a good idea to take a nibble (or two). There was a hole in the sleeve…

…and a hole at the seam between the sleeve and the right front.

Since my mother loved the sweater dearly, she wanted me to fix it. I was rather reluctant, having tried such a fix once before with no success. I told her I no longer had the yarn, so it couldn’t be done.

A couple months later, she discovered the yarn somewhere in her house – I had given it to her to use for practice since she had thought she might revive her knitting skills. She called me and excitedly told me she was sending me the sweater and the yarn. Inwardly, I groaned.

Generally repairs are made using duplicate stitch. That means you run a fresh strand of yarn over the existing stitches. This technique is often used in situations where you want colorwork but it isn’t practical to work the various colors while you are knitting using techniques such as intarsia or fair isle.

The problem with duplicate stitching is that since the yarn is doubled in the area where the duplicate stitching is done, the texture of the fabric is completely different. The yarn doesn’t have room to move around as it normally does and the patch is stiff compared to the other fabric. So even if I could duplicate stitch over the holes perfectly with the same yarn I used to knit the sweater, odds were that you could still easily find where the repairs had been attempted.

Today as I was going through old magazines, I found an article in the February – April 2012 issue of Cast On about using duplicate stitch to mend your knitting. Deborah Swift showed how you could run a contrasting color of yarn through the sts where the needle would have gone through them as they were worked, making it easier to do the duplicate stitching correctly. I decided to give it a try.

I ran the yarn through the area with the hole in the sleeve. With a trained eye, you can see that two stitches were severed by the moth, in the same column of sts in adjacent rows.

When moths create a hole in the sweater, they break strands of yarn, then the area unravels and creates a hole. In this case, two strands were broken. Because the strands were otherwise intact (vs. the condition of the fabric had it simply worn thin and then develop into a hole), the stiffness effect of the duplicate stitching would be at its full intensity.

After several tries, I managed to do an acceptable job of tracing where the stitches should have gone. Can you tell where I did the repair?

I think it could only be more obvious had I used bright orange yarn to do the duplicate stitching.

I also attempted to fix the hole at the seam (again, see the picture above for the results), but because of everything going on with the seam there, it was especially difficult to determine exactly which strands had been broken, much less figure out where exactly to do the duplicate stitching.

In the end, I would say my efforts at repair were a bust.

If I ever knit a sweater for someone else in the future, it will be done with the understanding that if it needs to be repaired, I will not be the one doing it. I hate darning!

Every year knitters make sweaters to wear to Rhinebeck and other famed knitting events. I have never attended any of these events so I have never gotten to knit a Rhinebeck sweater.

A couple weeks ago I bought plane tickets to attend my 20th high school reunion. In Florida.

I had intended to make two new sweaters to wear this spring, but when I bought the tickets for our trip, I decided they must be finished before we left so that I could wear them on our trip.

The first swatch (left) is for the Leaf and Picot Cardigan from Interweave Knits Spring 2011. I’m making it with The Fibre Company’s Savannah DK in Hickory, which is a sport weight yarn made of 50% wool, 20% cotton, 15% linen and 15% soya. So it’s half plant fiber (vs wool) and a lightweight yarn. The sleeves are not full length, and the color is very much spring.

The second swatch (right) is for a cardigan that has appeared in advertisements but has not yet been published. [There are privileges that come with being a tech editor, and this is not the first pattern I have knit before it was published.] I am making it with The Fibre Company’s Terra in Copper Pennies, which is a heavy worsted weight yarn composed of 40% alpaca, 40% merino, and 20% silk. Thus the yarn would probably be well-suited for a warm sweater, but this design happens to have 3/4 length sleeves also, and it is an airy lace pattern. The color is also very much spring.

It’s been almost four years since I’ve visited Florida. It has been almost 20 years since I have actually lived there. According to weather.com, the average high temperature in March is 80 degrees. So even though these are spring sweaters, they may not actually be of much use to me while in Florida.

If nothing else, I will not be cold on the plane.

Some of Joey’s recent creations.

This was inspired by the picture on the side of the Lincoln Log tin.

And the other side. Note the patio on the back.

Shall we call this a multi-media creation?

And finally…Joey the Soldier.

With his sword and shield. Note that his shield features a special “poker” [down by his elbow] for getting the bad guys.

Love it!

Yesterday I picked up my copy of Earl May’s 2012 Flower & Vegetable Seed Guide. With snow on the ground, it is certainly not time to start planting any time soon. But it is time to start planning.

I have made more than one attempt at gardening over the years. When I first moved to Nebraska, I planted a garden. But I lived in a house built on the side of a hill where all the topsoil had washed away over the years. The soil was so full of clay that the only time you could weed the garden was when it was muddy.

When we moved to this house, there was a nice garden plot in the back yard. The previous owners had a garden and left a cherry tomato plant that grew the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted. I tried doing wide rows (3 feet) and planting a various array of things, but the most I ever accomplished was trying to keep up with the weeding. As in, the time I spent in the garden would be spent weeding, and I never got much harvested (when I could find it amongst the weeds). We’ll just leave it at that.

Two years ago I built eight boxes along the lines of Square Foot Gardening (SFG). I got some peat moss and some good compost and planted lots of things. It was far more successful than any previous attempts. The weeding was minimal, and green beans actually grew quite well instead of being eaten by bugs and never producing a thing.

Last year was my second year with the SFG boxes. I didn’t plant any zucchini as it had taken over an entire box the year before. I didn’t have any volunteer potatoes as I had had in the pre-SFG era. Some of my herbs came back, but not all of the ones I expected. I planted fewer green beans, but they didn’t do as well. With a toddler in the house and an incomplete fence, it was hard to get out and spend much time in the garden. So I got less out of it than the year before.

Last fall I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I grew up eating bread that my mother made using wheat she had ground herself, but I had never thought about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts when it came to other food. It totally revolutionized my thinking.

I got rid of [most] of the processed food in our pantry. [One half shelf of such food remains, aptly referred to as “contraband.”] I started shopping at the farmer’s market. I bought new cookbooks, including The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. I read Cooking Solves Everything by Mark Bittman and bought his cookbook, How to Cook Everything.

Then I started reading An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. It’s an essay rather than a cookbook, though it does contain a few recipes. But Tamar totally changed my approach to cooking. Rather than needing a recipe with a list of ingredients, I now look at my ingredients and think of how I can combine them into something that will taste good.

Which leads me back to gardening.

I don’t mind the work involved – the weeding, the planting, etc. My problem was that I didn’t know what to do with the produce when I got it. I mean, you buy six little cauliflower plants and they’re all going to be ready at the same time since they were all planted at the same time. So when they’re ready, you’re going to have nothing to eat but cauliflower for a few days since you have six heads to consume. After that, you won’t have cauliflower for another year. How motivating is that?

In one of the early chapters, Tamar Adler talks about coming home from the grocery store and cooking all her produce – roasting, boiling, whatever – and then eating on it for a week. Cook it when it’s fresh, use up all of it (including the broccoli stems and the water used to boil the vegetables, if you can imagine), and then eat on it and make the week’s meals out of it. With that approach, I can roast five of the six heads of cauliflower, freeze them, and eat them next winter when the ground is frozen. That I can do…and I no longer fear harvesting six heads of cauliflower at once. So now I’m excited about gardening in a whole new way.

{Yes, I know you can freeze things and can them. I saw my mother do all that with my parents big garden we had in Michigan (before I started school). But I homeschool and work from home – I can’t make a full-time job of gardening and putting up produce as my mother did.}

So this is my garden. This is where I am starting. I have my seed catalog, and I am doing my planning. I am excited about what I am going to grow, and I have lots of ideas for how I’m going to use it. This year’s garden will be like no other. Stay tuned…