Tricotomania and more

Steph asks this in the comments. Quite reasonable question, I suppose. I have no idea.

I have picked up the socks that I abandoned in my haste to knit the blanket. They are coming along well. The first one is approaching the cuff (or the end of the ball which amounts to the same thing). I am loving the yarn (thanks, Cassie) and the pattern.

There is also the ribbed sweater in Rowanspun DK for Tigger. I could pick up the second sleeve where I left off fairly easily though I don’t fancy it at the moment for some reason.

That damned lace. It is so seductive. I find myself contemplating the Rosebud Shawl, after reading Ted’s notes on it. (Going to find the link for that shawl has turned up a wealth of temptations. Rabbit holes, indeed.) Or various mentions of Orenburg lace. (I might just have to order this, which Cassie linked to.) I also have a whole pile of lace shawl and scarf patterns that I accumulated last summer which are calling softly.

The main problem is a lack of suitable weight yarn, though I’m sure that could be easily remedied. I have never really knit with anything finer than a light fingering weight. Nothing wrong with that for a shawl but I am tempted by something finer.

I will go off and knit my socks (which are lacy) while listening to more of the audiobook I took out of the library on Thursday. I have been thinking of trying audiobooks for a long time but only got around to it this week for some reason. If you are interested it is Eventide by Kent Haruf. I had read Plainsong (which this follows) and really enjoyed it. And I am enjoying this, too. If you like a lot of plot, it won’t suit. But if you like character, Haruf is the man for you.

Cate asked for pictures. I know she is not the only one who would like to see them. The mothers of the baby for whom I knit this blanket have a digital camera and know how to use it. In fact they have photos of a few other projects that they have only neglected to send to me. Forgive them. They have an 8 week old baby and various post-partum complications which take most of their energies. I am sure that one day there will not only be a photo of the lovely lace, but also of the lovely wee girl wrapped in the lovely lace. Patience. Apparently it’s a virtue (not that I’d know that from experience or anything).

With a title like that I should have a photo but still lack the appropriate equipment so you will just have to believe me. I finished the blanket last night. It is now blocking. I guess I underestimated my ability to get a project like that done quickly. I also didn’t account for the fact that the pattern is not that complicated.

I got to the point where I thought I could shift into the border yesterday. I took the blanket off the needles (threaded on a long contrasting piece of yarn) and steam blocked it with the iron just to see how big it was.

It didn’t look like it would be big enough. So I’m back to doing the pattern as written. Did another repeat and a bit yesterday so just under 2 to go before the border business. It goes pretty quickly even though there are more than 400 stitches to a round now.

Easter is still 3 weeks away….

edited to respond to Cate’s comment about the lack of visuals

I picked up the yarn on Friday but couldn’t start until Saturday evening (due to a board meeting, which went very well, thanks). As of now (Monday morning), I have 8 repeats of the eyelet pattern* (i.e. I am now at the point where there are 9 of those eyelet squares in each quarter).

The pattern as written does 13 repeats (so there would be 14 per quarter) before changing to the border pattern. There is a line of eyelets between the centre square and the border. It calls for Zephyr knit on 3.75mm needles and has a finished size of 40″ to 48″ (depending how you block it).

since I am knitting with Baby Ull on 4 mm needles, this thing would come out bigger anyway. And it is a christening blanket rather than a shawl so doesn’t even need to be 40-48″. While knitting yesterday I stared at the charts and stitch counts and did a bit of mental maths. I worked out that I can reduce the centre square by 3 repeats (so I’ll have 11 little eyelet diamonds in each quarter on the last set) and add an extra plain row to the transition bit and then knit the border pattern with one fewer repeat in each eighth (the pattern says 5, I’ll do 4).

I suspect that this way it will come out to some sort of sensible size for a baby. And I will be more likely to finish it.

BTW, the centre square has just enough pattern (the eyelets) to keep me from being bored out of my mind (garter stitch will do that to me) but not enough to slow me down. I do have to pay attention but it is not at all complicated.

*For those who have forgotten (or never taken in) which pattern I am using it is Evelyn Clarke’s Paisley Shawl from the Spring 2005 Interweave Knits.

for Cate and others who would have liked a photo

The lace knitters among you know that a photo would not have helped much. For those who have yet to try knitting lace, it is notorious for looking awful in progress. You wet it and stretch it out when it is done opening up the pattern. So, right now my christening blanket looks like a pile of white garter stitch. “Pile” being the operative word as it is all scrunched up on circular needles.

However, for those who would like some assistance with the visualization, here is a wee sketch. The pattern doesn’t really have a schematic and the photo in the magazine is of the shawl knit in red and folded in half (as you would to wear a square shawl). I am quite taken with the little scribble tool in the notebook view of word which I tried out with this. Drawing with a mouse is not an exact science, though.

This is a general schematic of the centre of the blanket. I started in the middle and am increasing (with a yarn over) either side of those diagonal lines. For the non-knitters, this means that there is a double row of holes along those lines. The pattern is indicated by the little ‘x’ things (hand drawn with a mouse. I got sick of it so jumped to the last row where there are 11, my modified number).

Each of these ‘x’ things is one of these:

For those who haven’t knit lace, it is basically putting holes in your knitting on purpose. In this case in groups of 4. It is an 8 stitch by 8 row pattern. After a field of these, there is a row of eyelets (holes) with some plain rows either side to break the central square from the border. The border pattern has an 11 stitch repeat and is mirrored across the centre of each side so you have to add or subtract repeats in pairs.

So the next smaller border size would be 22 stitches smaller, thus having to lose 3 repeats of the central square (24 stitches) and add an extra plain row (which still has those increases at the diagonal and thus adds 2 stitches per round to each quarter).

Hope that helps.

I purchased 8 balls of white Baby Ull and a set of 4mm dpns today. I did a wee swatch in the LYS to see if 4mm needles were what I wanted.

Small hiccup. I was thinking that doing a garter lace pattern from the centre out was a bit crazy and actually opened up the Best of Knitters Shawls and Scarves and contemplated making the Stonington Shawl. But I think I’ll go with the original idea. It wasn’t based on a careful analysis of all the possible options but it is a pretty shawl that I have contemplated knitting before. And i like that there are eyelets in the central square. And I don’t mind purling.

So I should probably devote more time to knitting and less to reading/writing blogs/e-mail.

I’m almost done the heel on the first sock. But maybe it should go on hold for a bit, too.

If anyone wants to take bets on whether I will finish this, let me know what your vote is in the comments and I’ll do a draw amongst those who were right (there are only 2 choices; I considered a sweepstakes on when but then I’d know who had bet on what date and that wouldn’t be fair) and send off some sort of prize (to be determined).

A very close friend had a baby about 6 weeks ago. This friend has a very strong faith and I have known for a long time that she will have the baby christened. At various points, the idea of a christening blanket has floated to the front of my mind.

For various reasons, I have not really seriously entertained this idea. Since the baby has been born, it has floated forward more frequently, perhaps, but I would then think that I’d need to know the date of the christening and that would mean indicating to my friend that I was knitting said blanket and that would impose a deadline and I hate knitting to deadlines …. Nothing happened.

Then Cassie starts talking about square shawls. She even chooses a pattern and starts knitting it. She comments on how much she is enjoying knitting lace. It even seems to have calmed her urge to start new projects. Incidentally, I also know the date of the christening. It came up in conversation. (I’m babysitting a cat on heart meds while they are away.)

I went into the LYS today to see if they had any white Baby Ull. They didn’t but I asked if they had any in the warehouse or the other store and there will be 8 balls to pick up on Thursday. I’m thinking about the Evelyn Clarke Paisley shawl in the Spring 2005 Interweave Knits. Because it is in the house and only about 48″ square. Even the woman in the LYS thinks I’m nuts. The christening is on Easter weekend.

I am telling myself (and the woman in the LYS) that I know these friends plan to have more children and thus there really is no deadline. This might be for the next baby’s christening. I’m not sure I believe myself.

Work is suddenly insane. I’m glad Tigger is at basketball camp. On the plus side, work means money. Tigger ‘needs’ a loom (she says) and my mother has just told me about a place that sells second hand and antique looms….

The trouble with the internet is that you make friends who live far away. Sometimes you get to meet these folks in person and do stuff together and deepen the relationship. But you still live far away and don’t get to chat as often as you’d like. So this is one of those posts to keep my various cyber-pals up to date on how things are chez moi. Well, that’s not quite right because I also have some friends I met in more concrete locations who keep up with me on this blog because moving across an ocean can make it hard to hang out with folks who used to live around the corner, too.

Knitting
First, because the title and original purpose of this blog alludes to the importance of knitting, a little update. I am working on a sweater for Tigger (as she would now like to be called on this blog) in Rowanspun DK that I got at Xmas-time. I did swatch, flat, in stockingnette, to work out what needle size makes a fabric I like. I measured the gauge on that swatch but am knitting the sweater in 2×2 ribbing, in the round, so I started with a sleeve on the grounds that that counts as an in-the-round swatch. I did the whole first sleeve and decided that I had cast on too many stitches and didn’t like the way I incorporated the increases into the ribbing. So it was a large swatch. The increase rate was fine, though. I have now finished the first real sleeve. It is much better. I’ve ripped out the ’swatch’ and started the second sleeve. This is a size that fits in my purse so it is the only project I’m working on right now. Weird, I know.

I do have a rather gorgeous skein of Bearfoot that Cassie gave me (so that Fleece Artist didn’t actually increase the size of her sock yarn stash) that I keep eyeing up. I may very well wind that into balls and start a pair of socks for myself soon. The big drawback of working for myself from home is a lack of commute time in which to knit socks.

I’ve got a knit night coming up at the home of a new homeschooling friend. I’m looking forward to that, too.

Spinning
I’ve been trying to spin more of the Persimmon Tree and plied up some today. I have discovered that 7.5 mm knitting needles make great bobbins to slide the cop from the spindle on to. I can then hold two in my right hand to ply with my left (thus creating the Z twist; I spin the spindle with my right hand when spinning the singles; I learned all this from PGR’s High Whorling). Various ideas for what to do with it are mulling.

I plied up the stuff I spun on Cassie’s wheel today, too. It is pretty uneven but probably not bad for a first attempt at wheel spinning.

Homeschooling
There’s been a lot of that on this blog lately so I’m sure you’ve got the idea that it is going well. I’m relaxing into an unschooling mode. This is perhaps made easier by having a child who is interested in lots of stuff. This week we brought the following home from the library: one video about Einstein, one book about Newton (we watched a video a couple of weeks ago), Romeo & Juliet for kids and A Portrait of Shakespeare (both Lois Burdett whose series of Shakespeare for kids I can wholeheartedly recommend), a book about Plains Indians (to go with all the Laura Ingalls Wilder and other stuff about the prairies that we’ve been reading), a novel for her bookclub (yes, our public library has a bookclub for 9-12 year olds), and The Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankenweiler (recommended by Becky to help overcome my ‘issues’ with art and get more of that into our un-curriculum). I think that’s it though we already have library books still at home from the last time, and we ordered the Birchbark House (as another complement to the Wilder and whatnot).

We finished reading Marianne Caswell’s Pioneer Girl last night and I thoroughly recommend that as well. If nothing else it is a good illustration of what kinds of work girls did in the late 19th century. A gendered division of labour is evident but it is not quite what those who harken back to ‘tradition’ make it out to be.

This week I get a bit of a break. It is March Break in Ontario schools (or at least our Ontario schools; we live on the Québec border and their break was a couple of weeks ago). This means day camps. Tigger will be playing basketball all week.

Work
Of course now that I am busy, I got a few offers of contracts in the past couple of weeks. This week will give me an opportunity to complete one, start another, and hopefully finalize a third. All are interesting and fit reasonably well with the whole homeschooling thing. One will involve some travel but probably not until my partner’s teaching term is finished so there will be enough flexibility to make that not much of a disruption.

My volunteer work kicks up a notch this week with a long meeting of the Lambda Foundation board. I added this commitment before I decided to homeschool. I’m still not sure quite what I’ve let myself in for but the meeting this weekend should make that clear. It will be good to meet others who have also made a commitment and work out what we want to acheive and how we plan/hope to do that.

The AtMP board is also going well. I had a meeting in NYC at the beginning of the month (that also afforded the opportunity to see Cassie) which went well. It is so good when you find an organization that just feels like home in both its aims and the other folks involved. I’m glad I got more involved with them.

Basketball
I have scored baskets in the last 2 games. This is not that usual for me. I’ve been pretty happy with how I’m playing and really enjoying it. We need a few more women to join us as we’ve not had more than 8 at most games despite having 11 on the roster (we do have one pregnancy and one back injury that happened in the middle of the season though, which we can hardly blame those individuals for). But the women I play with are good fun and we all share an ethos of focusing on improving our own game. We like it when we win but are not focused on that as much as having a good time and playing well (however that is defined for each of us; we have widely differing levels of skill and experience).

I am really glad that I decided to play when I moved back here a couple of years ago. I had never played organized basketball before and signed up as an individual in a recreational league. The organizers made up a team of all those folks who had done the same. Some of us are still together and we seem to add a couple more ‘individuals’ each season. My experiences with sports as a child and youth were not great so I am really glad that I’m having some good experiences now. Helps me keep fit. And also helps me have an encouraging attitude for Tigger. One of the reasons she plays basketball is because I do. And she sometimes comes to early games and seeing how much we enjoy playing inspires her.

Planning for the future

This is not the big-F future but the little-f future. We are planning to go to the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival in mid-May. Not planning as in booking hotel rooms, or anything concrete like that. But talking seriously as if this is going to happen. I guess maybe we should sort out accomodation but I’m not worried.

We’ve also started planning a road trip to Cape Breton for early September. There is so much we want to do in Cape Breton that we’ve decided that the rest of Nova Scotia will have to wait. Louisbourg, the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck (no phones but lots of kites), bird watching (bald eagles!), hiking, maybe a mining museum, hopefully some fiddle music. Don’t think ‘vacation’. More like intense unschooling thing. We’ve decided that audiobooks are required for the journey. Mamma friendly children’s audiobook recommendations gratefully received.

Before then Tigger is going to spend a week with her grandparents birdwatching and going to the ballet in Toronto (hence the Romeo & Juliet stuff). The fact that she can take the train on her own makes that very easy. But, as she reminded me today, we do have to book some train tickets.

She is also planning a trip to England to visit her other grandparents and various friends. Her original idea was to spend a month but at Xmas she realized that when she is there she misses her Canadian friends so the current plan is for 3 weeks. Her dad will go with her but she’ll come back alone. Have I mentioned she is very independent? She’ll be 9 in mid-July.

And then there is camp. Probably 2 weeks at the local Y girls camp. This will be her third summer. She loves it. The first year she went for just under a week. When she got off the bus the first thing she said was ‘Can I go for 3 weeks next year?’. It turns out that you can’t go for 3 weeks so she has to settle for just under 2. The schedule gives the staff every 2nd weekend off, something I wholeheartedly approve of.

Someone has said that there are very good science day camps at the university in the summer as well. We might try to squeeze one of those in just because the opportunity to spend a whole week doing science with scientists in university labs only comes around when the other kids don’t have school. I have to train all the people I do work for to think about summer holidays and march break as times when I am MORE available. The activities available in the holidays do not suffer from the problems that led me to homeschool (stultifying boredom being top of the list) so we are more than happy to make full use of these activities when they are available.

I think that’s enough for today. If you got this far, thanks for reading and I hope you don’t mind getting the round-robin Xmas letter version of my life instead of a personal e-mail, letter or phone call.

Author: Tigger (aka ‘the kid’)

Today we did a core sample of a snowdrift on the east side of the house at 10:36 am.The temperature was -6C. Our feet didn’t sink into the snow when we walked.

First we tried using a shower rod. We hammered it into the ground and pulled it out. But when we tried to take it out, the sample broke into little pieces. It was also very difficult to get the sample out of the rod.

Then we used a spade and got a much better view of it. It was 17 cm deep. 3 main layers: 2 of packed snow and 1 of ice. The ice was 8 cm from the ground and about 1 cm thick. I’ve drawn a diagram (click to make it bigger).

When we brushed the snow away from the ice layer it was very uneven and then got thicker. We looked at it very carefully and decided that it was a fossilized boot print from earlier in the winter. The snow with the boot print in it must have melted a bit and then refrozen.

If you woud also like to do this, here are some tips: never use too long a rod, always take notes, it might be a good idea to have a camera around, and we saved two samples in ziploc bags and put them in the freezer. I loved doing this experiment and would recommend that you try it too.

it’s off to NYC I go…

Have a cab coming at 5 a.m. to take me to the airport. Meeting of the AtMP board all day Saturday. Then I’m meeting a friend for her daughter’s art show, dinner, and knitting (no doubt). I’m staying over and then coming home on Sunday afternoon to arrive in time for supper. A quick trip that promises to be fun.

6 p.m.: “Mommy, can I watch some TV before dinner”

Me (somewhat distracted): “Sure.”

8 p.m. (unprompted, while getting ready to read to each other before bed): “I learned about comets today.”

Me: “Really. How did you do that?”

her: “On TV, there’s a program on astronomy called ‘Heads Up’. I’ve seen it before.”

Me: “Where did you find that?”

her (in that ‘obviously’ kind of voice): “On TVO kids.”

We proceed to talk about comets for a bit and she explains what they are made of, where they come from, what the ‘tail’ is, how to make one yourself (usefully starting with rubber gloves because it requires dry ice and that is really cold), etc.

Then we read.

I have got to stop worrying about whether we are doing this right.