Prime Time Knitter

Beehold!

Bee Fields is now an official FO. Although yesterday's blocking was successful, the weather didn’t cooperate for photos until this afternoon. Despite a forecast of a beautiful fall day, I woke to find that it had rained.

In the afternoon, the sun came out, and too much sun distorts the color. So I tried everything I could think of to get good shots, when Ed suggested that I pin up the shawl on the tomato cage. So thanks to his inspiration, here’s what it looks like:

This close up shows all three of the blocked motifs.

For the record, the pattern is by Anne Hanson of knitspot.com. The very beautiful yarn is 100% merino laceweight from Fearless Fibers, in the notorious colorway. I used size 3 US needles because I knit loosely, and the petite size. Even so, my shawl is bigger than the specifications: 68 inches across and 35 inches deep. I wanted a large, drapy shawl, and this fits the bill. I used just over 1000 yards of yarn.

This was a great project, despite my uneven progress at times. The final shawl has a few very minor errors. A few of the twists on the edge border twist the wrong way. The garter stitch band that separates the first two sections has a couple of purls mixed in with what should be all knits—but I can no longer find them. So this does it for me as an error-free project. It definitely was a step up from the shawls I had knit in the past because of the edging and the YOs on both sides of some of the motifs. And I never worked with drop-stitch patterns before (they are fun). The pattern was well written and easy to follow, and one I heartily recommend. This was also my first shawl using true laceweight, and the Fearless Fibers yarn was a wonderful choice.

Also contributing to this blog post is DS. You might find it surprising to learn that I actually ran out of “bee” puns for the title, and DS chastised me for my lack of inventiveness when I ran some titles past him. I wondered if anyone under 50 would pick up “bee-guiled again” from the Cole Porter song “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”, and he just stared at me when I mentioned that one. That tips me off immediately that I’m into the realm of obscurity. But he didn’t even get “Let It Bee”. So we’re moving on to new projects that give me some fresh fodder for tortured blog entry titles.

The scarf knitting has gone very slowly thanks to indecision about a stitch pattern, but I will have something to show in a day or two.

The Pause That Refreshes

The knitting on Bee Fields is complete, and there is a huge void in my knitting life even though it is not “done”. To be sure, it has to be blocked, and pinning it out to dry will take a while. But that isn’t something I can do in my weeknight knitting because I like to block during daylight. I still have to weave in the ends, which I did manage to conceal successfully.

But for the rest of the week, I need something to knit.

I’m not yet ready to go back to my sweater WIPs because they require some thought. I still want to try Lucy Neatby’s buttonholes on the red Calvin Klein sweater. That will require sitting down with her DVD and following along with her as I try them out on a swatch—not something I can do on the same weekend as I’m devoting to blocking Bee Fields. The Devonshire jacket needs to have its fronts reblocked, and if Bee Fields dries in a day, as it should, I’ll do that. I still have to verify my sleeve-cap adjustment, and that may require morning time on another weekend.

So I’m turning to my planned scarves, and to a charity knitting project. Helena has talked about a mitten drive run by her Knitting Guild in Rochester, with the mittens given to inner-city children. Although I haven’t knit with acrylic a lot, and I’ve said many unkind things about acrylic, I do have some that isn’t terrible. I used Phildar yarn for my son when he was small (and I don’t think Superwash was available back then). The French imports, which I was able to buy in a small LYS in Greenwich Village, felt nice and wore well. I used this 100% acrylic

for this sweater, from a Pingouin pattern.

I also used a Phildar wool-acrylic mix for this sweater

So some stash diving is in order to see if I have any more of the heavy tan, or to find something else to add to it. This pause to knit some simple things and to finish a small project for someone besides me will be a nice break before taking on the difficult tasks of completing the WIPs—and working out some self-designed patterns that have been spinning in my brain for the three-plus months I spent on Bee Fields.

The End Is Near

This weekend I’ve been given time off for good behavior—or so it seems. I finished a big assignment last week, and although my next one arrived at 5 PM on Friday and will be tough to complete by its deadline, I decided to ignore it and tackle a problem part of Bee Fields, weed a few rows in my garden, and do some modest cleaning.

The back neck edge of Bee Fields is far too demanding for nighttime knitting. It requires grafting the two halves of the shawl. The pattern tells you to leave a length of yarn for the graft, and to do this by starting with a provisional cast on.

When it is removed there are live stitches to be grafted. The one thing I wished I had done more carefully was to protect that length of yarn. It got quite a workout in my lap as I knitted away, and it began to get fuzzy. After I realized that, I made a tiny yarn butterfly and pinned it to the shawl, but I was still concerned that it would not stand up to any frogging. I had to get the graft right the first time.

There are two pitfalls for me. I often can’t undo a chain stitch so it unravels. I suspect this is some character flaw because I can’t always do it on sacks of flour or rice either. It is hit or miss, and when it is “miss”, I’m left with picking out bits of the crochet thread. That would have been a disaster on Bee Fields. In my mind’s eye, I could just see my work of three months unraveling before my eyes.

But it did work this time, and I manage to get the stitches lined up for the graft.

The Kitchener stitch unnerves me. The first time I did it was on socks intended for one of my son’s grade-school teachers. I was attempting to finish five teacher presents in about eight weeks, and I decided that a pair of socks with cables would be a perfect present. So I knitted away on my first sock project ever and saw the magic of a turned heel. Everything was going just fine until the toe. I must have had five pictures in front of me showing how this was done, and I don’t know how many tries it took to get it right. DS and DH still comment on the creativity of my vocabulary. And when I say how knitting is relaxing, they just stare at each other and try to keep from laughing as they remember the evenings spent on that pair of socks. I have gotten better at it since then, but starting the graft still leaves me puzzled. Luckily I have Katharina Buss’s Big Book of Knitting. Although this book isn’t as comprehensive as others on techniques, the topics it covers are illustrated extremely well. I really need this every time I start a graft:

So how did it work out? Not badly. The stockinette part is as good as I can manage it. This was the first time I grafted YOs, and they could be a bit better.

But I’m not taking this out. I think it is good enough, and if I tried to remove the graft to make any adjustments, I’d probably make a mess. And I don’t think the tail left for grafting would stand up to the challenge of being picked out and used again.

When I asked Ed what he thought of it, he gave me what has now become his usual response. “Look at all the mistakes. I think you should rip it out.” I told him that he was acting like Charles Boyer in Gaslight, trying to make me, like Ingrid Bergman in the movie, think I was insane. I suspect he doesn’t want me to ask this question any more, and his ploy is working.

Today is the end of the Seasons of Lace KAL, and I’m not done with Bee Fields. I have one more repeat to finish the third and last section (three rows to go—which will take an entire evening):

Then I have the 12-row border to do, bind off, and block. There’s a good chance it will be done this week, and blocked next weekend. I guess in the scheme of things, a one-week delay isn’t a big deal.

As I was stripping the bed for a laundry, and before I did the graft, I was listening to the Knit Picks Podcast. There was an interview with Miriam Tegels, the World’s Fastest Knitter. I could only speculate on how fast she would have finished Bee Fields. If you want to see something astounding, check these videos.

Seeing Is Bee-lieving

I knit to a double standard. When I read in blogs or on Ravelry that a new knitter is hesitant about knitting a sweater or tackling some technique that is easy for me, my response is always “go for it”. But when it comes to taking on something new, my feet get cold also. I knew the day would arrive when I would reach the drop-stitch bee motif, but I put that in the back of my mind. I’ve never knitted a drop-stitch pattern. I suppose the reason is that I don’t find them practical. It seems as if they’ll catch on something or the item is just too lacy for me. But when I saw Bee Fields it was a “love at first sight” project and I just plunged in.

Despite the great directions, something about yarning over and then deliberately dropping the yarnovers didn’t really sit well. (Just wait until I try steeks for the first time and have to cut into my knitting. Now that seems truly terrifying.) But now that I see the effect of the drop-stitch bee I’m enchanted.

The 6 rows that form this motif have taken me the entire week and row 5 alone took 2 hours last night. There is a bit of tinking required on row 6 tonight to really finish it off correctly and ready the knitting for the next group of drop-stitch bees. So the chances of finishing by the KAL deadline are vanishing. I measured the shawl when I photographed it, and the small size seems more appropriate for me, and so there are fewer rows to finish than I planned. So will the shorter length help me finish on time? I don't know yet. I am pleased that this part of the shawl worked out so well, and perhaps now some of the time spent wondering how this will work out will be redirected to getting more bees finished. Section 3 is 30 rows long, and only 6 are about done--and then it is on to the border.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

The remnants of Hurricane Hanna arrived on Saturday afternoon, after a dreary, humid, and unpleasant day. We mostly get hurricane remnants in my area, but they can cause flooding, downed trees, and loss of power—making me realize first hand how precarious things are for people in the direct path. So I imagined what the evening would be like, trying to knit by candlelight and hoping that a huge tree wouldn’t crash through my roof. I don’t know how Abe Lincoln did it, but my Mr.-Magoo-like eyes can’t manage without a blazing Ott light to illuminate my work. Although the rain was heavy (a reported 4+ inches), my power remained on. In fact, it turned out to be rather a bonanza for Bee Fields because the rain disturbed my satellite signal and I wasn’t able to watch any TV at all—I had a marathon knitting session from about 7 to 11 PM, and got very far on the middle Bee Swarm section. I polished it off on Sunday, despite stopping at 10 for Mad Men.

So here is another picture of my incremental progress since the last picture.

This does make me smile because I’ve reached a milestone. And I do love looking at the pattern. In fact, I’m wondering if blocking will make it look less bee-like when the knitting is flattened out and that nice rounded shape for every bee is gone.

It really is possible to finish by the September 21 KAL deadline. Although I have never worked with drop-stitch patterns, Anne gives such great directions that I don’t think I’ll have trouble with the final Bee-in-Field section. Most of the wrong-side knitting is just purl, and it might even go faster than the middle Bee Swarm. So I feel energized, and after the separating rows of garter stitch tonight, it is on to Section 3.

It didn’t seem as if we got terribly strong winds, but when I checked the garden on Sunday, I found four of my twelve tomato plants blown over.

I had staked some and caged others with old stakes and cheap bent cages, mostly because planting this year was unplanned and I didn’t really think through what would happen when the tomatoes grew tall. Ed is at work now making me heavy-gauge wire tomato cages for next summer (and he is at work making compost bins and laying out soaker hoses also). We managed to get the tomato plants upright, losing only a few. The rest of the garden enjoyed the rain immensely. All my seedlings have sprouted, and my beans are ready for harvesting.

I hope at least one of my 200 green tomatoes will get jealous of the beans and start turning red.

Making a List and Checking It...Over and Over and Over

I began my first free weekend in weeks by doing what I always do: making a to-do list. I should know better than to waste my time on this exercise, but I don’t. I’ve just gotten better, and I figure that the items that I put down after five minutes of compiling such lists aren’t likely to be done, and I edit down my list to the top ten pressing things. Well, this week, such practical chores such as “balance checkbook and pay bills”, “laundry”, and “start a simple knitting project” didn’t make the cut. The only thing that got less than half done was “work in garden and finish planting”.

By the end of the weekend, my garden looked like this:

I had planted broccoli, Swiss chard, lettuce, kale, and lemon basil. I also weeded. But I did not plant my mustard green seedlings, or direct seed my fall plantings of carrots, beets, and turnips. I did dutifully cover up my rows with row covers. Not only does this keep the deer away, but it also keeps the larvae of the cabbage moths off the broccoli and kale, and it prevents leaf miners from ruining my Swiss chard. It isn’t pretty, but it works.

Just a few days later, I beam as proudly as a mother whose child has achieved some milestone at my broccoli and lettuce (planted from seedlings).

The earlier plantings are doing well, and it is too bad that there isn’t much time left to the growing season. We had our first meal of zucchini yesterday, and it looks like we may be getting some cucumbers after all.

The deer had nibbled off the top of my bush beans before I had a chance to cover them up, but they’re rebounding and many have flowers.

And I’m still waiting with anticipation for my first tomatoes to turn red. I must have about 20 that look like this:

To pretty things up, I spared no expense and bought the 4-for-$10 mums that are now for sale at my supermarket. These are planted in a trapezoidal bed, and if they take, I’ll use annuals for a small border next year, and then plant bulbs between the plants. The deer got to them the night I planted them, and they now are surrounded by netting too.

I had extraordinary luck with 3-for-$10 mums a few years ago, and I really should have divided them this year.

Knitting was not so successful. It turned out that I didn’t fix correctly the stitch next to the mistake I photographed in my last post, and I thought while ripping back to make that change I should go for perfection and get the whole thing knitted right. So it took a couple of nights to rip back and replace the stitches accurately, and then when I started knitting back those rows, I made a few more errors. I use a simple Excel spreadsheet to count the rows, which enables me to keep track of those that need repeating. Here’s what it looks like for the Bee Hive section:

I don’t think 15 is my lucky number.

Chillin' Out

For someone who hates the heat and humidity of summer, I have to concede that this year’s August has been a dream month. There have been only a couple of days where the AC was needed, and most of the time I didn’t even turn on an ordinary fan. Yesterday was so unseasonably cool that our heat came on in the morning (and I rushed over to the thermostat to turn it off!). And the prospect for the rest of this week looks fantastic. So combined with this taste of fall and my less hectic work schedule, my mind has wandered to heavier wool projects. Yes, I could take out the Devonshire jacket and finish the sleeves, but what fun is that? Daydreaming about projects as yet unknit is much more suited to my mood.

Also contributing to my gut feeling that I need a simpler project are the silly little errors I’m making on Bee Fields. I do very well at the start of my evening knitting, but after 9:30 my confidence exceeds my abilities. Here is another error:

I probably knitted on the private side instead of purling. This is my third error of this sort, and I’m losing patience with myself. I know that someone would have to stand next to me with a magnifying glass to see this, but this lack of perfection is becoming bothersome. Unlike other projects, I’m not ripping this back to fix it. Actually, I did drop down on the stitch immediately to the right to correct it, but I know I can’t do that on this stitch column, with all the decreases. Well, I could do it, but the mess it would create would require ripping everything to the row below.

So what to do? Without the precision that Susan (just look at her 8/14 post!) brings to the mathematical analysis of her projects, I did a quick-and-dirty calculation to estimate how long it will take to finish Bee Fields. If I do the larger size, and I’m thinking of that so the shawl is large and flowing, I have 78 rows left. At 2 rows a night, that will take me about 40 days to finish, and I’ll miss the KAL completion date. At 4 rows a night, I can finish in around 20 days, and have the satisfaction of a FO. My Type A genes tell me to “go for it”. My sensible genes (completely overwhelmed by the Type A genes for most decisions), remind me that I am only averaging about 3 rows a night and the rows are getting longer. In addition, those knit later in the evening aren’t terribly accurate and the next evening is spent fixing the errors. So a compromise seems to be in order. I should probably knit Bee Fields only until about 9 PM and then move on to something else.

In addition to a plain ribbed watch cap in brown Heilo for Ed, that I’ve promised but never delivered, here are the candidates.

When I finished the feather-and-fan scarves from Scarf Style, I had one ball left of each color. This is Debbie Bliss’ Alpaca Silk DK. I bought another ball of black with the intention of knitting a horizontal scarf only in garter stitch:

Pros: Easy Scarf
Cons: (1) I really don’t need another scarf like this right away. (2) I haven’t decided if I want fringes. Regular fringes will probably fray, and I want to try looped fringes that twine around each other. This will require swatching.

Several Rhinebecks ago, I got this beautiful handspun yarn from Buckwheat Bridge Angoras (goats not rabbits). It is mohair, wool, and llama. I’ve already swatched for it, trying a basket-weave pattern, but plain garter stitch would be better.

Pros: Easy Scarf
Cons: (1) The fringe issue again. If Ed ends up with this, he doesn’t want fringes. I suppose I could add them once the scarf is done, if I want to. (2) If it gets warm in September, I don’t want to knit with this yarn.

It occurred to me that an uncomplicated sweater would be as good as a scarf for a simple project, and I’d use up stash yarn and have something useful to wear when I work. I had bought yarn from Snow Star Farm and buttons from Tender Buttons to make this sweater from an old Jo Sharp book.

Pros: I’d like to use up the yarn before Rhinebeck so I can buy another color and design my own gansey pullover with it.
Cons: (1) I’m not sure I like this sweater well enough, and I don’t need a pattern to make a sweater like this. (2) The sweater looks a bit shapeless, and even if all I do to improve it is add fitted sleeves, it will still require modification that I don’t want to spend time doing now.

I’ve always liked this sweater from Jamieson’s Knitting Book 2, and despite the cables, it isn’t really hard. I have Bluefaced Leicester yarn from a small farm, purchased at Maryland that would be heavenly to knit with.

Pros: I can use a pullover. It would give me a chance to do a gusset
Cons: (1) I’m not sure this is the best yarn choice for this sweater. (2) It is only “borderline” easy, and might require some occasional thought when I get to the gusset.

Although I have described ad nauseam about the dearth of good yarns in the 1970s, it was possible to find occasional pearls among the swine. This yarn was a French import, and I have a lot of it. I had bought it to make a three-piece outfit that consisted of a coat, a skirt, and a sweater. Half the sweater is knit (and should be frogged). But I would like to use this blue yarn, and this sweater from Knitter’s Fall 1999 (also in Arans and Celtics) would be fine. I’ve swatched for it and bought buttons.

Pros: I can use up stash yarn and have a nice work sweater.
Cons: I may want to change the sleeves so they’re set in, so the pattern would require modification.

And so now it is decision time.

Getting Some ZZZ

The crunch is finally over. Unlike past years (and decades), when I’d send in finished work by making frenzied trips to the post office with speeds that would impress a NASCAR driver, I now heave a sigh of relief and click the “send” button. (Ain’t technology grand.) I happily did that this morning and so, I’m a free woman again in the sense that my time is my own. There is still some work to do, but no doubling up to get two assignments done at once. I may even take this weekend off. And I hesitate to say it out loud, but I may not work on Labor Day.

I can now attend to my garden, the accumulation of chores that has mounted up while I did nothing but work, and perhaps, a sock project. I did sign up for the Summer of Socks, but I’ve yet to cast on or even decide on a project. Well, the summer isn’t over, and so there is still time. I had expected to knit three pairs, and it actually is still possible to do that.

Bee Fields has been consuming. There are nights when I think it has been too demanding for my level of alertness, but I’ve plugged on anyway. The payoff hasn’t always been worth the effort because I’ve made too many careless mistakes. I’m now back at row 20 of the Bee Hive section, and you can see the cute little bees amassing.

This is about the halfway point on this section of the shawl, and the rows are getting long. If I have to rip a row or two, it takes the entire next night to fix it. That prospect should tip me off that I need to be more careful and consider a backup project that requires less focus. But this is a captivating design and hard to put down, so I haven’t even had the energy to contemplate something new. With all my newfound “leisure”, perhaps I will.

The garden has been moving along despite my neglect, although weeding is certainly in order. I’ve never gotten all the zucchini jokes. Even though my plants start out well and bear some fruit (well, vegetables), they succumb to the squash vine borer and collapse in a heap before I have so many zucchini that I’m pushing them on friends and neighbors. My late start this year might save me from this peril, according to the books that claim the vine borer isn’t a threat after midsummer. And I’ve been rewarded by my first squash blossoms. We should have some zucchini for dinner round about Thursday—and I can hardly wait. (This is not an invitation for those of you with excess summer squash to overnight them to my doorstep.)

And because there’s not much knitting to show, here’s a gratuitous pet picture. Addi is becoming quite at home. I leave the cage door open most of the day, and she flies wherever she wants. She is still resistant to being totally finger trained. She will get on my hand when she wants to (but always for food). She is now stick trained, though. And she is molting. For a tiny bird, she sure loses a lot of feathers. Why are birdies always doing the cute things the second before you snap the picture, and then looking dumbly into the camera?

Hanging by a Thread

Look before you leap.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
All work and no play makes Jack Marjorie a dull boy girl.

I’ve been annoyed at myself for some weeks now because I’ve been in a work bind of my own making. Back in June, I thought I was running out of work for the summer because my two ongoing projects had delays. When I tell my family that I’m running out of work, they roll their eyes and make unkind remarks about my sanity. The fact is I’ve been very lucky as a freelancer, and I’ve only been out of work for a few weeks in the nearly 24 years I’ve been doing it. But I panic when I see holes in my schedule. So I asked some of my favorite work contacts for work, thinking that I’d get one or two short assignments to tide me over until the bigger projects got back on track. I ended up getting offers for many short assignments, and I didn’t have the good sense to turn any of them down. So now I sit here, with two more tough weeks ahead, spouting adages at myself and feeling glum because almost every other aspect of my life feels as if it is out of control.

My blog postings evaporated and my blog visits became spotty, but I was slapping myself on the back that I had finished the first section of Bee Fields and was now successfully on to Section 2: Bee Hive. This pattern is much harder for me than the pattern in Section 1, because it has YOs on both sides. But I was careful, and I reached row 20 of 54 thinking I had knit everything perfectly—or so it seemed until about 9:30 last night when I saw a glaring error on row 12. So here I am, back on row 12:

I’ve managed a bit of work for the garden, but not nearly as much as I ought to have done. I won’t have time for a week or so to prepare the planting rows for my fall crops of lettuce, broccoli, and Swiss chard, so I started flats. All my broccoli seeds appear to have sprouted:

The garden itself is filled with promise. I have the tiniest hints of cucumbers. I can almost taste the zucchini, even though it is clear that it will be some weeks before there is any sort of harvest.

I have green tomatoes on each of my 12 plants:

If I had only planted these in June instead of July, I'd be awash in tomatoes by now.

And even though I can’t wake up and smell the roses just yet, my mums, which are not supposed to bloom around here until September, are in flower:

Hidden Away

I’ve always suspected that my DNA is just a few nucleotides shy of giving me OCD. Although I’m far too messy to have OCD, in addition to being a packrat, I can understand the need to establish a routine and maintain order.

I try not to articulate my thoughts about some of my preferences because it gives me the sense that my quirks, which seem to have ballooned as I’ve gotten older, push me closer to the category of being truly strange. Then I read Anne’s July 27 post on “favorite rows”, and I felt a little less weird. I, for example, will always stop knitting cables on the purl side, and preferably on the fattest (untwisted) row possible. I never leave rows in the middle—the house could be on fire, but I’ll knit to the end. (And, yes, I have a favorite lane in the lap pool, I have a favorite pen to use when writing checks, I always start entries in a notebook on a new page—the list goes on and on.) A major obsession in knitting is where I should attach a new ball of yarn.

When I started knitting, perhaps because Depression-era parents shaped my upbringing, I felt that you had to use up every last bit of yarn before attaching a new ball. This made it necessary to have knots in the middle of pieces that had perfectly good seams where the ends could be tucked in invisibly. Without letting my mother know about my extravagance, I began to leave a yard or two of yarn over so that the new ball could be attached at the seam and body pieces would have smooth fabric. I knitted happily this way for years and years. All my early sweaters were knitted flat from the bottom-up—I didn’t have circular needles until the 1980s. A routine was established and order maintained—how great is that!

My first shawl disturbed the sense of euphoria I get from having a knot-less garment. Egads, I realized. You have to attach a ball in the middle. Luckily for me, Myrna Stahman, the designer of my first shawl had great instructions on grafting, and so I attached nearly invisibly a new ball of the beautiful Haneke wool-merino mix I used, and you can see that it has felted in nicely over the years I’ve worn and washed this shawl.

Things weren’t so easy on the Shetland Triangle. The yarn didn’t lend itself to grafting—it is a three ply and it tended to fall apart. So I had to knit a few stitches with new and old yarn and weave in the ends. This looks pretty neat, but it doesn’t really make me happy because I can find the join too easily on the wrong side.

On Bee Fields, as I began to knit, I realized that inevitably I’d have to attach yarn, and I spent hours pondering where I might do that. I had a eureka moment, when I realized that I could do it on the back of a sl1-k2tog-psso, and it would be invisible.

There are tails on the wrong side that can be woven in neatly.

Last night I finished the first section of Bee Fields, and I start the bee swarm section today, and so I’ll be on the lookout for another place where I can hide one more of the joins.

Ed finished the deer-proof tomato cage, and with almost as much delight as hiding this join, I discovered hidden among the tomato foliage about a half-dozen marble-sized tomatoes.