Prime Time Knitter

Duty Calls...Or Not

I haven’t needed a lot of reasons not to blog or, over the past month, not to knit, but I faced the mother of all excuses in November.  After receiving a summons for jury duty, and postponing it twice, I decided to bite the bullet and agree to serve.  Lest I sound unpatriotic, let me point out that I have been summoned as a juror three times before, and I have served on juries each time.  This summons was different, however, because it was for federal court in Manhattan—a two-hour ride each way, with the specter of being impaneled for an unspecified time.  I’d have to be on a 6:30 AM train to arrive at the court on time. A perk of freelancing is not getting on commuter trains before the crack of dawn, and at that time, I am typically sipping chamomile tea and reading the newspaper.  And as a freelancer, I receive no income except for the pittance that compensates jurors.  All in all, the prospect of losing the income and having my routine turned upside down for weeks on end threw me into a tizzy.  Things seemed even more discouraging when I called the court to see if knitting needles, like cell phones, laptops, or any other electronic devices, were prohibited—and they are.  So even my most positive fantasy of knitting on the train and during the countless hours waiting around for the court to be in session was dashed.

Before I learned about the knitting needles, I went through a series of mental projects that would be ok for train knitting, and I finally settled on hats.  All members of my household need them, especially Ed.  I had knitted Ed a ribbed watchcap some years ago, but it never fit him right.  It always popped up in the center in an unattractive way.  As a replacement, I decided to make another hat that had more fabric around the crown, selecting the plain watchcap from Charlene Schurch’s Hats On! book.  I also had the perfect yarn in my stash—undyed, handspun gifted to me by my Ravelry pal, Chere.  (Chere and I had actually worked together on a book—she was the staff editor and I was the freelancer—long before we knew that we were both knitters.  We “met” in the Knitters in Publishing group.)  Even before jury duty started, I finished the hat:

 

It is everything Ed could want—yet another gray garment, something warm and comfortable.  It was a joy to work with the yarn, and I think that the plainness of the hat shows the handspun look of the yarn at its best. 

I received the new summons to appear the Monday after Thanksgiving, but surprisingly enough, when I called in to see if I had to report to the courthouse, the message said to call in Tuesday.  On Tuesday, it said to call in on Friday for the following week, and on Friday, it told me not to come in at all!  So this year, the gift of time is something I'm truly thankful for, and I can get back to knitting as usual.  If I'm diligent with this week's knitting, I’ll finish Sirdal's sleeve and be ready to steek. 

Of course, I now have to do all the things I said I’d do “when jury duty is over,” but I think I can deal with that.

 

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

Hurricane Irene did not fulfill the dire forecasts, at least not for me.  Although it rained steadily through the night and morning, the winds never picked up sufficiently for the nearby trees to fall—although they did fall across some of our major roads, and there was flooding for lower elevations.  I took in the jar I use as a rain gauge to avoid having it blow around, so I’m not sure how much rain we got, but I’m guessing it was around 6 to 8 inches.

By 11 am the sun peeked out, and I was able to check the damage to the garden. 

Although there are puddles everywhere, the dry and beautiful weather we’re supposed to get for the rest of the week ought to perk up nearly everything (except my newly emerging spinach, which may need replanting). And by next weekend, I hope to pull the broccoli (back left) and put in my transplants. 

Some plants seem as if nothing happened.  My beans appeared to enjoy themselves, and there’s enough to pick for another dinner should the leaves dry out today.

The peppers are regrouping for another crop, some of which will join the 37 stuffed peppers now in my freezer.

And I will have more tomatoes.

I don’t know why the vines grew so high this year.  Those cages are 6-feet tall.

I should enjoy my first row of carrots soon, but those soaker hoses won’t be put to much use. 

It is too wet to take any outdoor knitting pictures, but my shawl, Fiori di Sole, is about half done, and there are assorted UFOs that need attention. Knitting content will return shortly.

 

Taken by Storm

I’m sitting here, now that I’ve made all the preparations I can think of, waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Irene. I’ve lived through other East Coast hurricanes but not in the era of 24-hour news shows and web coverage.  So although this one seems worse than most, the sense of impending doom is much greater than in the past, when we simply knew “it would get here.”  In fact, my first memories of a New York hurricane have almost nothing to do with the hurricane itself.  When Hurricane Hazel hit back in 1955, I spent the night with my grandparents.  I was only 7 or 8, but I remember it being very dark and rainy, with windows rattling.  The image that has stayed with me was my midnight trip to the bathroom, when I saw a small, pink, cylindrical container on the sink.  Not satisfied to leave well enough alone, I opened it to find my grandfather’s teeth—and I was so scared that I ran back to bed and hid under the covers.  And I never mentioned this to anyone, until years later, well into adulthood, when I confided it to my mother. 

The constant coverage of Hurricane Irene, along with clips of winds damaging houses and trees falling on roads and cars (along with the specter of the far more powerful Katrina), has gotten me spooked a bit.  My house is on a hill, and although I’m not looking forward to the predicted 10 to 12 inches of rain, I should experience little flood damage.  But the winds could cause havoc because of the many tall trees.  We removed some dying locust trees like these:

but my next-door neighbor has not.  Now when I wake up at night, I think of the damage those downed trees can cause, and the forthcoming days with no power.  It takes a lot less than 50- or 60-mph winds to knock out our power, and restoring it to such a huge area after Irene will take time.

So for now, I seem to be obsessing about the damage I can imagine—and it too is about as serious in the scheme of things as my grandfather’s dentures.  My poor garden, which I’ve coaxed and nurtured since the spring, may succumb to the wind and rain.  It is ironic that this is happening just as my tomatoes are ripening en masse.

I’ve picked all I can, even the not really ready ones, because I think those may be all I get.

The growing season was a challenge.  Cucumber beetles destroyed my cucumbers and most summer squash.  Only one yellow squash continued valiantly to bear, and to give us a small but regular supply, despite its powdery mildew affliction.  But I think the squash I picked this morning will be the last. 

The 100° heat at the end of July caused my broccoli to turn yellow before the heads got very big, but the side shoots that are still coming have been quite delicious.  I have new broccoli transplants ready to go in, but the last few weekends have been too rainy.  The July heat also delayed my peppers and eggplant, but we did get beautiful peppers after all, as well as beans and more beans. It has been a great bean year.

Before that really hot week, we enjoyed our Chiogga beets and the greens

and picked a great crop of onions.

If the hurricane damage is not as bad as I fear, I’ll be planting that fall broccoli, chard, and lettuce.  And the carrots that are looking good, but not ready yet, should get us through September.  And this might be the first year I get successful Brussels sprouts.

So for now, I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll make it through, and it is time to check again (for the hundredth time) to see if there’s a change in the computer model that has the storm going directly over my patch of the world.

 

Disconnected, Discharged, and Discombobulated

This past weekend has not been the most conducive to knitting or modern life in general.  On Friday afternoon my neighbor packed up his van to transport his wife and three kids to some vacation spot.  He is a bike rider, and his bikes were mounted in a rack atop the vehicle—where they caught onto my fiber-optic cable and ripped it from the side of my house as he drove the van out of his driveway.  In an instant, I had no phone and no Internet.

I can tell you from personal experience that the allure of being unplugged is not the delight that one might suppose.  In fact, it is a huge PIA, especially when one is supposed to transmit finished work electronically.  The other issue is that Verizon is on strike, and getting a repair scheduled is a rather daunting experience.  After an hour on hold (my red-faced neighbor allowed me to use his phone for this negotiation), a repair was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.  And by Tuesday evening, I was back, happily, in cyberspace (reading, not so happily, the 100 or so email messages that had collected). 

I can now state without hesitation that I have a serious Ravelry addiction.  Four days without looking at FOs, new yarns, old yarns, and visiting the forums has been torture.  And I’ve missed my blog reading too.  I couldn’t check the hourly weather (although it hardly mattered since it rained almost every minute of Sunday and Monday and I could see exactly what was going on) or news.  

But, I figured we could live our disconnected life almost normally, until I tried, on Sunday, to make the two-minute drive to the knitting group I joined recently. I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened.  My neighbor told us that if we could piggyback on his network connection, we could use it until our connection was restored.  This appealed to my son, who is a devotee of online word games, and, because you can’t see their front door from our house, he decided to wait in our car for our neighbors to return home from a dinner out prior to their departure.  He turned on the car lights to read, and waited for an hour.  It also appears he forgot to turn the lights off.  And it turns out that our neighbor’s signal is too weak, so the whole thing was a waste of time. Part of Monday was spent getting a jumpstart for our car—not something on DH’s to do list.   

This also was the weekend I decided to take photos of yarns, so I could finally post some stash pictures on Ravelry, and pictures of my WIPs so I could formally qualify for the Summer of Lace KAL prizes.  The torrential rain (only about 4 inches for us, as opposed to a foot at points south) made that impossible because there was no light, and a stupid mistake eliminated several days of presumed progress on my shawl.  The pouring rain was also the reason I couldn’t walk to the knitting group. 

I finished the shoulder flower area of Fiori di Sole with only one minor glitch, but now that I’m in the easy, repetitive part, I’ve had six rows to rip to fix the dumbest of mistakes.  It took me an evening to tink back, and now I think it is time to pay a bit more attention.

What should I do to express my pleasure at being online again?  Well, posting more regularly certainly seems in order.  

 

Having My Cake

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  It just seems like a time to enjoy yourself and relax.  I don’t have a big family, and so the holiday simply entails goofing off a little and making a meal that we wouldn’t have time for on an ordinary day.  In particular, it gives me a chance to cook.   I like to cook, but DH does most of the routine cooking, and so making a meal always is fun. 

I usually start the day with some reflection of thanks, but this seems like an awesome proposition.  If I just look at the front page of the paper and consider that, unlike so many others, I haven’t had to face a natural disaster over the course of the year, or military action, or rampant disease, any problem I’ve thought I had disappears.  So I set my sights on smaller things.  If “thanks” isn’t the proper word, then I’m “glad” that my El Molino cookbook, which had been misplaced, turned up in my pre-house-repair reorganization.  There are a few recipes in this book that are truly wonderful, and I’ll share a favorite in this post.

I bought this cookbook, which is now out of print, at some point in the mid-70s, and like so many other “vintage” things, it is going for an absurdly high price on eBay or used book sites.  

I used it when I began to bake bread, once I realized I could knead dough in the earliest model Cuisinart.  And there’s a great recipe for honey-oatmeal bread in this cookbook that is covered with stains.  [A goal for 2011 is to convert it to a bread machine recipe.]  The recipe that has nearly as many stains on its page is the one for carrot cake:

El Molino Honey Carrot Cake

2 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour	1 cup oil
2 teaspoons baking powder	1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda	2/3 cup honey
½ teaspoon salt	4 eggs
1 teaspoon cinnamon	2 cups grated raw carrots
	1 cup finely chopped nuts

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.  In electric mixer bowl, combine oil and sugar; mix well.  Add one cup of the sifted dry ingredients; blend.  Add remaining dry ingredients alternately with the honey and eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Add grated carrots and mix well; then mix in chopped nuts.  Pour into a well-oiled Bundt pan.  Bake at 325 degrees.

 

I use the Cuisinart (a newer model than my first) to chop the carrots, first using the shredding blade and then the “regular” blade to mince the carrots finely.

 

Once the carrots are peeled and chopped, the rest of the recipe is, well, a piece of cake.  It makes for a very wet batter, shown here poured into a 9-cup Bundt pan.  Because it is hard to find a Bundt pan without a no-stick interior, I only greased it lightly (with butter).  I use canola oil for the cake. 

And, I wasn’t disappointed:

 This cake is so delicious that I have never put frosting on it, and it appears to freeze well. 

What else did I do on Thanksgiving?  Some knitting was involved, but I did, at last, get to play with my new sewing machine.  The fruits of my labor will be on view in my next post.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as much fun as mine. 

Happy Valentine's Day

    

 

Picture Imperfect

I spent the weekend at the Nikon School, and I now can recite at least fifty reasons that my photos are such poor representations of my knitting and yarns.  Although I have all this “book learning”, it will take a while to put the new things I learned into practice.  So over the next few weeks, I hope there is a noticeable improvement.  The Nikon School sessions are held in many major cities, and the first on learning to use a D-SLR camera applies to any model camera.  If you end up with such a camera and are as clueless as I appear to have been, I’d recommend it.

I was lucky enough to have one of the instructors sit next to me at lunch, and I asked him about the specific issues in photographing yarns so their colors were true.  On the downside, he explained that the camera could never capture the subtleties of the colors we see with our eyes, but he also gave me some great advice on getting more accurate colors, starting with calibrating my monitor (a device is required for this) and using a photographic gray card before shooting.  But even without these technological advances in my camera equipment, I can start playing with my camera settings.  This might just be the exercise that will get me to post my stash photos on Ravelry. 

Because I had intended to have four leisurely hours on the train as I rode back and forth to Manhattan on Saturday and Sunday, I managed to get super-express trains (straight from Grand Central to Croton, with no stops).  These offer only about 40 minutes of knitting time, and so my cowl is still in progress, but close to being done.  

Thora is finished, although the seams would benefit from a light steaming.  After an unseasonably warm fall, we just had our first snow of the season followed by cold.  So I’ll need to pick the warmest day I can for an outdoor modeling shot.  I am really pleased with the way it turned out.   

To avoid a totally pictureless post, I’ll play the cute-card and show what my birdies have been up to.  Larry Bird has now been with us a year.  Although he is shy, he has a very sunny personality and adores Addi.  He does have favorite toys.

  

Addi is fonder of human contact.  This behavior is quite remarkable because she was terrified of large men when I first took her in from our deck.  We suspect she was mistreated.  For the last several months, she has had a particular interest in sweatshirt pockets.

 

And she is the main reason that Kindles will not be suitable in our household.

 

My next post will have actual knitting content as I either return to UFOs to clean my slate, or swatch for my 2010 projects.

Cable-Ready

My pack-rat tendencies extend beyond yarn, patterns, and knitting books to cable hooks.  [I actually find it shocking to stumble upon Ravelers who claim they do not have a stash and complete one project before buying yarn for the next.] I don’t cable without a needle, and so cable needles are essential.  When I first started knitting, there didn’t seem to be many options for cable hooks.  My first one, which I used for years and years, is this:

I believe it came in a “small” (as shown) and “large”, and since I rarely knit or cable with very heavy yarn, if I had one, it has long since disappeared.  I also have a set of Clover cable hooks that I inherited from my mother, but I have switched from hooks to the straight or wing variety, and seldom use them. 

I try to get a cable needle that matches the needle size I’m working with (to avoid cables that have a different stitch size from the rest of the knitting), and therein lies the need for many different cable needles.  And so as a public service, I’ll give you the needle sizes of all my cable needles. 

The Clovers are equivalent to 2.50 US (3 mm), 6 US (4.25 mm), and 8 (5mm) needles.

The Knit Picks cable needles are equivalent to 3 US (3.25 mm), 5 US (3.75 mm), and 10 US (6mm) needles.  I prefer the cable needles without the grooves, and although these are pretty and have nice points, they aren’t my cable needles of choice.

The Brittany Birch match 3 US (3.25 mm), 7 US (4.50 mm), and 9 (5.50 mm) needles.

 

This left me with a dilemma when I began to knit Thora.  I am using size 1s (2.50 mm) for the body and cables.  I searched everywhere for a cable that would work on such thin needles, partly for Thora and partly to cable on socks.  I found one from Inox and ordered it immediately, but it is very odd.  It is much too long to use conveniently.  The Inox cable needles come in sizes 1 US (2.50 mm) and 5 ½ US (4mm).

While knitting Thora, I had an epiphany that will probably eliminate the need for any more cable needle purchases (although I can’t imagine there are too many other cable needles out there that I don’t already own).  Why not use 4-inch dpns—or, more precisely, one 4-inch dpn?  That is indeed what I did on Thora.

I have a few pairs of Suzanne dpns, which I got in sizes that would be typical for knitting gloves and mittens.  And when I saw that Knit Picks had a whole set of Harmony 4-inch dpns, I immediately added them to my needle arsenal.  Those shown below (from top to bottom are Suzanne ebony in size 2.50 mm, Suzanne rosewood in size 3.0 mm, KnitPicks 0 US (2 mm), and KnitPicks 1 US (2.50 mm). 

The Suzanne needles aren’t that easy to find and they can be expensive.  I got mine at Patternworks, which no longer seems to have them, but WEBS has a few sizes.  I like them better than the KnitPicks because they feel more substantial and have rounder points, but the KnitPicks are very good, especially for the price.

So armed with my 4-inch dpns, I’ll be cabling away on socks as soon as Thora is done.

The Fall Classic

I’ve been thinking about fall for most of this summer and reveling in the not-so-warm days and pleasant nights, smiling to myself when others have complained about “the summer that wasn’t”.  But however cool July and August might be, they are not fall.  Fall begins for me around my son’s birthday, which will be this weekend when he turns 25.  My mental image is taking him out as a baby in a carriage when we lived in New York City, and enjoying the bright sunshine and turning leaves in Washington Square Park.

The reason that I still think mid-September is fall is that for the past several years, Ed and I have taken a ride to one of the orchards around here that sells apples and apple-related items.  Our particular favorite is Salinger's.  We used to visit Salinger's with Will when he was little so he could get the fresh doughnuts made on the premises and the apple cider. 

The apple selection is the most impressive I’ve seen anywhere.

 And here is part of this year’s birthday haul of doughnuts.

 

Even a chocolate-lover like me makes an exception for these.  The smell of cinnamon that fills the car while driving home from the orchard is overwhelming, and Ed’s antidote for it is to eat as quickly as possible (minus the very large bite for me) some fruit-filled strudel that is also for sale.

It may seem to some that we are copping out on the true experience of apples in New York State in the fall.  The most dedicated will go to the many orchards and pick their own.  We do not.  Apple picking is one of those many things that you do with small children that sound great but turn out to be near or total disasters.  Like most parents around here, we thought picking apples would be a fun day out for a 6- or 7-year-old child.  And at that time, we packed Will into the car and drove off.  We paid our entrance fee, got our bags and picking pole, and proceeded to the trees.  At this particular pick-your-own orchard, the trees were surrounded by the lushest growth of poison ivy that I’ve ever seen.  It extended so far beyond the trees that anyone under 6 feet who wanted to get an apple would also get poison ivy.  So Will and I stood and watched Ed from a safe distance as he got one bag of apples with the picking pole, and then we took the long drive home—with one disappointed kid.  About two hours of driving for ten minutes of apple picking. 

This experience can’t hold a candle to the one that backfired on the mom of one of Will’s childhood friends.  She was the type of person who would spend rainy days with her kids making macaroni pictures (something I never knew was even possible).  She decided that Nicky and his brother should learn to look things up in the dictionary, and every time they came upon a new word, she would tell them to get the dictionary and see what it said.  One day, little Nicky was eating pumpernickel and pondered on the meaning of the name.  So his mom did what she always did—checked the dictionary.  In her version of Webster’s, its word origin is “fart of the devil”.  As you can imagine, the kids were delighted and shared this bit of knowledge with anyone within earshot.  This was the end of the dictionary lessons, and I’m sure their SAT scores suffered from this setback.

But fall will be here soon enough, and with it Rhinebeck and Stitches East—the true Fall Classics for me.  I’ve already begun my yarn-buying fantasies, which I’ll share in subsequent posts.  And, yes, knitting has been progressing.  Thora II is about up to the back armholes, but this has been photographed before.  So photos will have to wait until I’ve got something new to show.

 

Pooped

I’m at the point where I can taste freedom from seven-day workweeks, after what will be a marathon session over the next few days to get my last late assignment finished.  Monday is the actual due date, but if I hunker down and devote some long days to it, Tuesday afternoon is the possible end to the project conflicts.   All this work has not only made me a dull girl, but I feel totally exhausted.  I have to drag myself out of bed in the morning, and I nod off occasionally in the afternoon.  I am looking forward to taking a few days off toward the end of next week to do some of the cleaning chores that have mounted up.  At this point, mindless physical labor seems fantastically appealing.

And nearly all of my seeds are here, with the rest to arrive by the beginning of next week, so if the weather cooperates I can plant some spinach and get my indoor flats started.

Knitting has been slow, but modestly steady.  The front of Arbor Rose is done (but not blocked), and I planned and began Sleeve #1. 

I usually like to knit my sleeves together because I know the increases and decreases match, but this time I decided to do them one at a time.  There will be less frogging if I’m not happy with the result.  The only challenge, aside from getting the dimensions right, was to match the stretchiness of the sleeve fabric with the body fabric.  I planned for the stitch pattern to stretch only slightly as it conformed to the shape of the wearer’s body, so I had to leave an equal amount of slack in the sleeve as in the body. 

Also this week, I learned more about bird droppings than I ever wanted to know.  Addi, who will have been with us a year on April 20, began to have wet droppings, which is not a great thing for parakeets.  At first I thought it was too much lettuce, but after stopping the lettuce for a week, there was only mild improvement—sometimes the poops were fine, but sometimes they weren’t.  She looks fine, and acts fine, getting into things that she has no business investigating, and continues to boss poor Larry Bird around, but her digestive problems persisted.  I finally realized that the wet poops occur after she has been drinking water, and I took her to our local avian vet.  It is possible that she has birdie diabetes or a condition called polyurea.  The vet said that diabetes isn’t the problem in birds that it is in humans, and not to worry because she looks so healthy.  The vet visit was quite an ordeal, though.  Addi doesn’t like being in a plastic box to get weighed.  She is a whopping 42 grams, up from 38 grams in November—a good thing.  She doesn’t like having her nails clipped.  During the exam, she flew away twice and had to be captured with a towel, something I know she hates and I never do at home.  So after returning home, she just vegged out. 

Her spirits are much better today, and I have to collect her urine using this:

It is not as horrendous as it looks.  I put wax paper on the cage floor and use the device like a pipette.  Once I get enough, it will be tested for glucose.  But I can do this without a return visit with Addi, which is definitely a good thing for everyone.