Since I'm still luxuriating in the accomplishment of the finished sweater, here's details. I literally have to order Thing 1 to take it off, which makes me even more sad that I was so worried about the amount of yarn I had and needed to make it so slim. She won't hear of me ripping out the bottom to extend it, and so I'm just going to have to plan to make her another sweater later this summer to wear next winter. Hey! it's a good thing that it's so rainy, I guess. She'll have more cool weather to wear this before she outgrows it. That should happen in about a week, given her age and past history.

Folks have mentioned that the other kids can wear it, but I'm not sure Thing 1 will be able to handle that. It might just go into the cedar chest I've commissioned from Eric (heee) for future grandchildren, years and years ahead.

Since typing that has made me woozy, without further ado, here's sweater closeups:

Front shot. Bonus points if you can spot the error that is going to make me rip out a seam and redo it. For those of you who wonder at my sanity, I'm leaving some "cabling on the wrong row" errors on the sleeve saddles and one mis-done seed stitch. So there. I'm not nuts.


The sleeve cap fudging (I made them much shallower than the saddle-shoulder pattern I was referencing suggested) worked well. I started the decreasing, and then just kept laying the sleeve caps (on the needles) up against the fronts and backs until it looked about right. Apparently that kind of "improv within structure" knitting works best for me, since I'm mostly incapable of following instructions.

Here's the back. Nice bit of trash on the floor, no? I swear, I ask them to pick up. . .


And a closeup of the folded collar. This was a new technique for me, and I love the stretchy feel of it. I'm not certain that a purl folding row works in 1x1 rib, but it's what I've got. And no, my fingers are not purple, although it's cold in here. They're. . . finger colored.


And that's that. I have a new design for a hat on the needles, and if it works as well as I hope, I'll post a pattern when I'm done. Meanwhile, I have to re-do the seam on this sweater, deal with sick children AGAIN, and get the house back under control.

The DI team didn't place, so we don't have to stress about not having enough money to travel to the next level. I still think they were marvelous, but some technical difficulties during their performance lowered their scores. C'est la vie, and I don't think they're too traumatized. I'm loving the idea of having our time back from rehearsals!

And, I think that Suzee needs to make up her own non-fiction book meme. Can it count as tagging if I just command her to do it? Consider it done.

I Went To State and All I Got Was A Finished Sweater

Before I did something I've never ever done before yesterday, I cleaned some of the house. I read out loud to Thing 3 while the bigger sisters were at the ballet (hooray for Swan Lake -- I never thought it would darken our door again, after Thing 1's ferocious love affair with it during the Fairy Wing years). I even did some seaming on the sweater and began the neckband. But I didn't finish the sweater then, because I had to make a dinner to leave behind. Then I did the never-before-done thing.

I left Things 2 and 3 alone with their father. Overnight.

And boy, oh boy oh boy, did I appreciate it. He cheerfully took over the night and day duty so I could take the other children for Thing 1 to compete in the state level of Destination Imagination, and stay in a hotel and talk to adults and drink a teensy bit and not deal with short people saying, "It's not fair!" and "I'm bored!" roughly every 1.7 minutes. Never mind that my wild night out was spent, in great part, watching seven eleven year-olds jump on the beds in my hotel room. In the face of his great gift, not finishing the sweater before I left seemed minor.

A moment of appreciative silence, please.

There was a baby eating cereal Os in the carseat on the way to Elk Grove. There was a bit of reading aloud on the way. There was rain on the way. There was traffic. During the traffic, I figured, "What the heck! I'll knit some more on that collar," since I was nearly done with it. Imagine my horror when I reached into my bag and found the sweater, the collar, and the (circular) needle in two pieces. One needle had pulled right off of the cable. Yipes. I casually asked Thing 2, reading aloud to me from Pride and Prejudice from the back, how she was with picking up dropped stitches in ribbing. She calmly responded that, since she had never picked up a dropped stitch, she didn't know how she was with it. Made sense to me.

Fighting panic, I slooowly reached over (traffic is beginning to move a little more briskly at this point) and picked up another needle. I lifted the orphaned stitches onto it and put the whole mess down, resolving to buy a new needle as fast as I could after we checked into the hotel. I also decided that perhaps knitting on an interstate wasn't the wisest choice to make.

There turned out to be a yarn shop not two blocks away from the hotel. Now I'm going to rant. It really was two blocks away. But you couldn't walk there, nooooo. Elk Grove was, I assume, once a lovely teeny town surrounded by beautiful, productive farmland. I don't think there really was a downtown, because it wasn't much of a town. It was, well, if my eyes didn't deceive me, farms. Now, it's a collection of indistinguishable stucco housing developments going up like mushrooms in mulch, plus strip malls. Just what the world needs -- more imposing middle-class houses with large garages in front of them.

The hotel was new, too, and so was the strip mall in which the yarn shop (excuse me, The Yarn Shoppe, located two doors down from a Pastry Shoppe. I kid you not. What on earth possesses people to think that using Ye Olde Fpelling somehow distracts people from noticing that your strip mall/housing development has very little to do with Elizabethan England and a heck of a lot more to do with tawdry design and quick-buck agricultural land despoilation?)

One couldn't walk the two blocks to the store/shoppe in the Brave New Olde Englund that is suburbia today. It's all cars, all the time. Walking to the shoppe would have endangered our lives because the streets are huge, there are no sidewalks, and despite the "compact" signs painted on the parking spots in the asphalt scars over former pastureland, sport-utility vehicles are the new farm trucks.

And the yarn was pricey. But they had the needle I needed, and I heeded the pleas of Thing 1 for souvenir yarn and got two balls of this, fortunately on sale, for a scarf. Wasn't there a mohair scarf with a leaf or vine motif all over the blog world? Suggestions welcome. We all know about my lace issues -- be gentle.

At any rate, as I mentioned already, I had some down time at the hotel. I used it to good purpose. Back view:


Front view. I particularly like the penguin pajamas with it. Despite my fears, I had scads of yarn left. I could have knit this child a two-year sweater. Instead it fits her perfectly, if a little retro-trimly, right now.

Better pictures later. She wouldn't take it off today for me to bring it home.

I came home -- with a baby who now has teeth -- to happy, tired kids and a vacuumed house. Eric also managed to start the framework for Chicken Jail. The birds are getting a little antsy being cooped up, but it's all that little bird's fault. He's won the Above and Beyond the Call award for the weekend, and it's only half over.

Back at the former ranch, her team did a terrific job, as we had expected. Look! Neato puppets and an island hat:


There's just something about this team. Remember, they have to conceive of and execute everything themselves. They were ably led by my buddy Lisa, who seemed to be able to guide them without being either overbearing or driven mad, and they simply sparkle. No matter if they placed in the competition or not (the announcements weren't made yet while I was there), this experience has blessed the kids with great memories and deepened their friendships in ways I couldn't have predicted.

So maybe all I got was the finished sweater (50 days start to finish -- a personal record, I think) but we all got much more.

Seams to be a Sweater

Yesterday was an exciting day. Our smallest hen, the Sicilian Buttercup, had gone on an unauthorized walkabout the evening before, despite (because of?) the new pen. Frantic, weeping children and dire predictions of store-bought Easter eggs, as she's the only hen who lays white eggs suitable for dyeing, ensued. The morning was spent fruitlessly searching and printing up "Lost Hen" posters. We had to wait until the late hour of 9:00 a.m. to call the city Animal Control, who cheerfully told us that they had just gotten a call the evening before about a chicken. The kids asked if I thought it might be ours. "How many hens could have gotten out in this city last night?" I asked them. The authorities couldn't remember where, exactly. . . but they'd let us know.

Five minutes later we got a call from a lovely woman in a direction we hadn't thought to look, who said, "Yesterday, I was out front pulling weeds, and this chicken came walking across the street. She was really friendly." That's our girl! We assembled a thank-you present of some eggs and paraded to the next block to reclaim the prodigal. Unfortunately, every time she's out of the coop, she flies to the top of the pen to escape again. They're all under house arrest now.

During park day, I got to knit! At the same time, Thing 1 practiced for her big DI competition on Saturday, and during the evening, with the help of Mr. Swift, I turned this nice, but enormous, store-bought sweater (found at a thrift store for $2.00)



Into this



It's a good, 2-ply 100% wool, and I'm looking forward to working it into something nice. Why can I indulge in fantasies like this?

Because, last night at 11:00, this is what I had ready:


Please forgive the blurry picture and the slipper toe. I was too excited to hold the camera still. Since Things 1 and 4 and I are going to spend the night away from home tonight, in order to participate in the state competition tomorrow, I plan to turn these quadrants into an actual sweater tonight and tomorrow. We'll see how successful my cap shaping changes were when I sew it up. My Danish friend says she knits everything from the shoulders down in the round, because she hates cap shaping. Maybe. I didn't confess how difficult I found making sleeves symmetrical without simultaneous knitting, just thanked her for her suggestions and backed away.

While the three of us are gone, the home remainders have been making noises about "walking to the candy store" and "playing Daddy Crocodile." I wonder if they're going to have time to put a roof on the chicken pen? Probably not.

It's good to be needed.

Still not knitting; Lots of reading

Despite Rain's prompting, er, nagging and shouting, I have NOT finished the sleeves. I never told you I was a fast knitter -- in fact, I remain a quite slow one. I'm going fast for me on the sweater as it is!

But I can read very quickly. So, to distract you from the no-knitting, here's a reading-related meme. Related pictures follow. Found this one over at Samantha's blog and my buddy the Pancake Goddess did it too:

Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won't, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you've never even heard of. Feel free to do this if you haven't yet.

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marque
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
(The Secret History - Donna Tartt)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
(Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides)
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Atonement - Ian McEwan
(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert





Despite the appearances, we are not currently having an earthquake and the cases stand roughly upright. I have lots of books, but few on the list. The library has become a very important resource for my reading, especially for newly released books. It's part of my "don't drown in stuff" approach to life. With roughly a bazillion children, I can't also have lots of stuff and be happy.

This philosophy doesn't explain the as-yet-unused spinning wheel on top of that shelf, though. I need to email our teacher so the kids can begin to make themselves fiberly useful.

One more for Fooling

Not exactly a trick, really.

I forgot, in the WIP it out thingy -- those dratted Jaywalkers . They're not so bad, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they're not going to make it out of the WIP pile whole. After all of that moaning about the pattern, and figuring it out, I don't like the feel so far. I'll get them and find them and think about it some more, but I think this would be a nicer choice for the more subtle-than-it-appears Lorna's Laces yarn.

I certainly have more to think about before I make any decisions.

Oh, and today is my lovely mother's birthday. (And my aunt's, also.) Happy birthday to two of my favorite women. How is it, you think, that I remember to send cards to my mom but not her twin sister? Fluff fer brains, I tell you.

I'll have to blog in tedious detail about the seedlings showing their wee green heads at some point. For now I'm going to turn in. Maybe maybe maybe I'll get those neverending sleeves done tomorrow.

Maybe it'll still be April Fools' then.

Sing out, WIP it out

Rain, rain, rain, but the homeschoolers still get together to play and knit. We really know how to have fun while the children romp out some of that energy. Here's two of my friends discussing important things while knitting.

One project is a felted iris, the other a hat to match seven or eight others she's churned out for kids in the group. Thing 2 has her very own, in pink and purple.

The phone rang late last night, and a friend from the homeschooling group identified herself.

"You do remember that you have tickets for 10:30 tomorrow morning, right?" she asked.

"Uuuuuhhhh, no. Just how many tickets do I have?" I asked. I was panicking because I hadn't made any childcare arrangements.

"Four."

"Does Thing 4 need a ticket?"

"No."

"Well, in that case, I do remember, of course I do. We'll be there!"

So, we drove through some miserable weather to go here:

Ladysmith Black Mambazo is still an amazing show. A good time was had by nearly everyone, despite the hordes of screaming schoolchildren. We are fortunate in that we can take advantage of special school concerts without the attendant riding on busses or dealing with other peoples' children. Our adult-child ratio for outings hovers near 1:1.5. (My family skews this a bit, but we're talking average here.)

And, while they're not done, the sleeves did get to go and participate:


Sorry for the rotten picture. I was trying to avoid detection. These puppies have a rhythm all their own (knit, purl, knit, purl . . .) and despite all evidence to the contrary I maintain that I'm going to finish them one day.

In that spirit, here's my WIP it out group. It's not half as bad as I'd expected. Maybe I'm good at frogging things that aren't working, or maybe I've been finishing more than I had thought. On the other hand, I'm finding out where some of my needles and notions have disappeared to:

These are the ones I call "The Anniversary Socks." Once, long ago (two or so children ago, if I recall correctly), my husband and I got away for a weekend, with the help of my relatives. We went to Saint Helena, and spent a night at a winery/inn. The next day, we shopped after breakfast and fell into a yarn store. Since he doesn't want anything wool, I found a some cotton mix sock yarn, and decided to try. I don't think he'll eventually like them, but he'll give it a decent effort. If he doesn't like them, I'll get them. (Maybe that's why I'm making them a tad small.) They remind me of candy, and I think this is my effort at 2 socks at one time.


I started this sweater, the Under the Sea Pullover, when Thing 2 was a wee babe. I got the kit at my first Stitches West, when they still had it at the Oakland Convention Center. I loved the look of this sweater; I still do. Last May, almost a year ago, I decided I'd finish them on a family vacation. So I tore into the sleeve. After finishing one and beginning another one, I discovered I'd used the wrong white yarn to do the little arm checks on the first. Took all of the wind right out of my sails. With a bit of perspective now, I think I may complete the second one soon and then decide if I should rip out the first one. At least one Thing ought to be able to wear it!


Once upon a time, about the end of the first year of knitting, I decided that I was ready for "some color work." This is Vail, Dale of Norway's 1999 commemorative sweater. I changed the pattern so I could do it in the round, got to the color work and for some reason flamed out. Now I'm not 100% sure I want it, but I'm not ready to frog and steam it yet.


The floats aren't a thing of beauty (I don't think I knew about consistency in stranding yet), but they're not the train wreck they could have been.

I am not actually counting the that mate to the missing yellow sock or the orange vest, which has gone off on its own again. I'm not sure where I should look this time. I'm sure I'll find it when I'm ready to work on it. Trust me, it's not any bigger than it was the last time I lost it.

I promised you sleeves

So I've been wondering what they do with all their knitting. You know, the folks who can knit more than about 2 rows per day? Do they have sweaters spilling out of every bureau? Do they gift total strangers with knitted throws, gloves, and hats? Socks for their dogs? Do they inundate charities? Focus on fiddly heirloom knitting? Just have more freaking finished objects than I do?

I'm back at the needles after the Week Where Most Of Them Got Disgustingly Sick. I've done more laundry, wiped more floors, and changed more clothes (and diapers) than I want to even think about. I think it's gone now, though, that horrid something stalking my family's digestive systems. Knock wood, I never got it. I did manage to finish the back of the sweater, which made me cheery in the face of sick kids. Here it is, unblocked. It's less lumpy and curvy now.
Even more excitingly at the time, I used my kitchen scale to turn the one remaining ball into two cakes-for-sleeves: the same weight, wound by different helpers children and one is much tighter. I'm going to have plenty of yarn.

Speaking of cakes, today is actually my birthday. Whoopie! I managed to spend it running around like a whirlwind -- kids to houses for play dates, grocery shopping (to the exciting store far away, then to the regular store in town), back to get the kids, taking Thing 1 to the fencing club. By celebration time, I just wanted to crawl under the table and rest.

How could I, though. See this?
It's not a jumble of dirt-colored food, no, it's a made to order by my kids (mostly Thing 1) ice cream cake. Coffee ice cream and chocolate cookies, topped with more cookies and pecans. The way to this mama's heart, I tell you. And the little packet is a "made all by myself" gift from my dear Thing 2. She drew bunnies on the wrapping, but even better, had an argument with them while she was drawing them. "Be quiet!" "No, we won't!" "Be quiet!" "No!" Makes me wonder if that's how I sound to her.

And that's not all. This, from my spouse,

is enough to make my heart go pitter-pat. It's a real-life adjustible light stand! He geekily made a spreadsheet to calculate the lowest cost per lighted square inch, including tax and shipping. My vegetables and flowers don't care about that, and they are as happy as I've ever seen them. I have fantasies of starting seeds and selling them at the farmers' market, just because I can. Do you think my friends will start to avoid me if I begin to sidle up to them and say, "Hey, take just one more lemon cucumber plant. I've started so many. . ."

During the cake devouring, Thing 2 asked about the "flag salute." (We've been reading a lot of Beverly Cleary aloud -- comfort fiction for the six year old set.) Since I demonstrated conclusively that years of schooling hadn't taught me the salute, hilarity reigned. We segued into the national anthem, which gave me a perfect opportunity to sing aloud, something I inflict on my family as much as possible. Then we talked about the strategic significance of "striking the colors," and I suggested that maybe a flag could be taken down for reasons other than surrender. My spouse suggested that I was demonstrating a sex-linked ineptitude for military leadership. "Oh, my, take down that flag before it gets holes in it!" were, I think, his exact words. I said something about knitting the flag, and he was off.

"'How many stars? Damn! This stripe has seven rows, that one has nine! Why can't I keep this straight?' If you were Betsy Ross, Washington would have been accepting Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown before you had the flag off your needles. They would have been using underwear on sticks."

So, he knows me and my kntting fairly well. (And he gives great present, so we'll ignore his harassment.) This is a long way around to saying that the sleeves aren't actually finished. They're, well, barely started. Back to that revolutionary flag-knitting stuff, and the opening rant to this post, I knit on them more than it appears. It's sort of like hiking with a dog: you both go from A to B, but the dog goes a significantly longer distance. Great. I've just confessed in public that I knit like a dog hikes.

I do like to have it "right," although I'm willing to bag projects, as the infamous Olympic lace attests. So, as you can see in this picture,
if you squint really hard, the cable on the left displays the original plan, which was seed stitch all the way up to the cable. I'd finish things more quickly if I didn't try to reinvent every wheel. There's a reason that cables are on grounds of reverse stockinette stitch -- they look better. (Insert sound of me smacking head.) The right cable displays that option -- option Should Have Done It This Way First. I changed them both. I also used the same cable that's going up the middle of the back. I couldn't find a small, leaf-shaped cable that I liked to put up the sleeves. Thing 1 said, rather pissily, "So it's going to be more of a wave-cabled sweater than a leaf cabled sweater."

Yes.

Are you hypnotized yet by a yarny closeup?

So I changed the cables by dropping all of the stitches down and redoing them. I was close enough to the start -- insert hysterical laughter here, I can't get these much past the start, no matter what I do -- that it was easy doing it that way. I like the result. And hey! I got to knit without altering the finished size of the object one iota! Apparently, that's my new goal.

I'm hoping to actually have a pair of finished sleeves by tomorrow. I'm not, however, going to tell my spouse that.

P.S. When I'm knitting something like the sleeves, since I'm the total ADD knitter, I write out a list of the row numbers, 1-90 or so, and mark increase rows with asterisks. Notice I always try to knit sleeves, cardi fronts, etc. at the same time? That helps with the no-brain-required part. So, I can read if I look at my list, say, "I'm on row 15, it's a wrong side row, I'm starting with a knit stitch, now, seed stitch, hmmmm, knit, purl, knit, purl. . .oh, a marker, purl purl knit, back of cable, purl purl purl purl, knit knit purl, marker, seed stitch starting with a purl this time. . ." and so on. The inner dialogue makes enough room for some reading, either aloud, like I did today for the reptile-lovers (did you know that Komodo dragons have a "third eye" on top of their head? Neither did I!) or to myself, as long as it's a magazine article or relatively escapist fiction. And that's how I knit and read, at least right now.