Endings

A very photo heavy post
And just kind of heavy, too.
Many of these get bigger if you click them.






I made my last trip down to Quincy Illinois yesterday, to retrieve stuff from my grandmother's house.

My grandmother was not an easy woman to love.

This house was built for my great grandfather, who was a prominent merchant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Quincy. It was a thriving Mississippi River city then. By the time I came to know Quincy, it was a small city with a dying downtown and strangely disproportionate number of old people living on trust funds. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My grandmother was born in this house and she died in it, too. In the intervening 96 years, she lived in some glamorous and interesting places, partied with great exuberance, and made life miserable for the people closest to her. She never stayed away from Quincy for long.






These stairs were the most amazing thing to me when I was a child. They're still pretty spectacular.


Some rusting metal lawn chairs in the back yard.


So much of the family drama played out in this room. It was built on during my great-grandfather's declining years, when he could no longer handle stairs. He died in it. For many years it was the preferred socializing space, less formal than the living room. My grandfather died in it in 1999, at age 96. My grandmother died in it at age 96, in 2007. A tradition that will not continue. The house will sell as soon as my parents finish emptying it.




The attic.


The river and the bridge to Missouri.

And while I was away, picking out some of her paintings and refusing many offers of vintage table linens, I found that The Garter Belt site has vanished. This was not unexpected. Just a strange juxtaposition on the day when I say farewell to things and places that are receding into the past.

Going forward, look for more of my patterns to appear here on the blog. And I guess I'd better get my butt in gear on that website, too.

Project Reports

Kauni Cardigan

It's just about up to the bottom of the armholes.


I was delayed a bit on this because I was working on other stuff: some gifts and some chores that aren't related to fiber at all.

Knit What You Spin Scarf

On Knittyboard, Sarah challenged us all to use some of that hand-spun yarn instead of just letting it hang around like a Finished Object in its own right. This is yarn I made in summer/fall '06. I was starting to get fairly even and thin in my singles, but still with progress to be made. My plying left a lot to be desired. I'm making a totally boring garter stitch scarf out of it. Roughly fingering weight 2 ply yarn, #4 needles. Easy to pick up and put down between domestic demands.

Recent Spinning...Sort of

In the past couple weeks I've been plugging away at a couple of longer-term spinning projects. The Mossy Merino/Yak blend on the left is more than half of the total I'll do of that. I have about 60 grams left of the the carded blended fiber, which should go pretty quickly. I'm too lazy to count yardage, but it's about a fingering weight 2 ply.

The brown on the right is the first of what will eventually be a sweater-quantity of 3 ply sport weight. This is from natural brown merino/romney crossbreed. I had most of a bobbin of singles sitting around for several months and finally made some more to at least get that plied.

More views of the same:




My plan is to finish up the mossy merino, then go back and finish a batch of Shetland/Alpaca blend I bought at Wisconsin Sheep and Wool in the fall. That's another 3 ply, kind of DKish and I have about 8 more oz to get through of a 1 lb bag. Then, when all that is done and my bobbins are empty, I'll resume plugging away at the merino/romney cross batch, since that's kind of a lifetime commitment. Or, feels like it at this point.

For Kathy!

Proof of spring's imminent arrival: tulips! These are in my yard right now.

And in sepia:

April 4

We've moved on from the tricks and pranks earlier this week. Owen feels the score was settled unfairly in my favor and plans to up the ante for next year, so I guess I better plan ahead!

I've spent the last few days on a totally utilitarian project, a gift for a pregnant friend, so no photos until after she receives it. I will say that it's going very quickly and using up a bunch of yarn I found while rearranging stash. This is good.

We really and truly are moving full-speed into spring. Yes, there are still dirty mountains of snow at the edges of parking lots and such, but most of the grass is exposed and the birds are all in their spring-time rituals. The cardinals are talking up a storm. This happens to be one bird noise I can mimic pretty well, so I like to chat with them. Of course, if they are fooled at all, they probably think I'm another male cardinal moving into their territories.

You probably noticed that I did not Flash My Stash this year. I thought about it. But I just couldn't get it together. I'm working slowly toward my goal making my entire stash fit on the allotted shelves, with no little bonus boxes tucked in this closet or under that desk. It's a slow process because I'm not willing to just give it all away willy-nilly. And I need to spend some time re-sorting and tidying up boxes and bins soon. I know there are some boxes with empty space on the shelves while yarn sits in bags out and about and it could be stowed. So, maybe while I'm tidying up, I'll take the camera down and snap a few pictures. And possibly be ready to Flash on April 1, 2009.

Pictures of knitting soon! I promise. Or maybe of spinning. Or some of each.

April Fool - Updated

My dear teen-aged son Owen pulled a little prank this morning. He put a rubber band around the handle of the sprayer on the kitchen sink. After I got the boys off to school this morning, I went to clean up the breakfast stuff. I turned on the water and got a good soaking down my front.

So, my revenge?
I tinkered with his laptop. I reset his browser homepage to open to Barbiecollector.com. I turned the brightness all the way down on his monitor. These two things don't really sound like enough, do they?

Nah.

So, I bought some tootsie rolls and fashioned these:




And I put them on his pillow:




This seems like enough revenge. Don't you think?

Update at 9:45 p.m. He went into his room to get ready for bed, and a few minutes later said, "Thanks Mom," very sarcastically. But then he laughed. And he said he wasn't fooled, even for a second. His second utterance was, "What are those? Tootsie Rolls?"

No slouch, that kid of mine.

Weekend Update

Unnamed Kauni Cardigan

Click to see bigger view.

This is moving along very quickly. Amazing how fast sweaters go in smaller sizes. I took out a section of the beige yarn to get to the pink part while the darkest part of the browns was coming along. I think the dark brown and rosy pink looks like a chocolate bon bon with a raspberry cream center. Now, I'm just hoping the pink finishes up before I get back to the caramel section of the browns. I'm prepared to delete a section of the pink if I have to to make it work.

Social Knitting
I've had a great week for socializing with knitters. My friends Kathy and Sue came over from the Milwaukee area on Thursday. I took them around to some of my favorite Madison sites: The Sow's Ear, The Digger's Outlet, Cargo Coffee, Lakeside Fibers, Willy Street St. Vincent's shop. And I off-loaded a bunch of stash to Kathy who has a knitting club for kids at her school in Milwaukee. (Although I still occasionally cave in to the urge to buy yarn, I feel like my out-flow has been exceeding my in-flow lately and this is good.) We had a wonderful time! I even let them see my lair.

Today was Last Saturday Knitting. Although a couple of regulars couldn't make it (we missed you Molly Bee and Dale!) we did manage to attract the attention of a woman who saw us knitting and is in great need of a knitting group. All in all, a good time was had by everyone.

Mr. SABLE is going to San Diego for work tomorrow, so I'll have a few days of the single mom thing to work out. The biggest sticking point comes in the morning, trying to get both kids to their schools at the appropriate time. We got through this one other time, so I know we can make it work again. It's just the idea of morning complications that I don't like.

The Next Project

This is such a tantalizingly fun knit so far. The main stitch pattern, from The Swedish Mitten Book (which was republished under a different name about a decade ago), really involves only two different stitch sequences. Honest. I find it very hard to stop even when my muscles are aching and my nerves are twitching because I want to get to the next color section and see how they'll line up. I'm fervently hoping that the pink in my lighter colorway will line up with the dark rusty brown section. Of course, I could have been a diligent designer and started my skeins at the perfect spots to insure this, but I didn't. You know, I didn't even swatch this.

GASP! Did I just say that?

Well, yeah. Here's the deal. I made a swatch from this yarn in another chart (one that was all my own original work) and washed that one. And sent it off to a magazine a while back. The magazine must be planning to reject my submission, because the deadline for completed work for that issue is tomorrow. BUT they haven't yet sent me back my stuff, including my swatch. So, I'm kind of working from memory about what gauge I got and on what needles. No matter. I figure this sweater will fit someone and since it doesn't have to fit me, I just went with some plausible numbers. But, I didn't swatch this particular chart, or the border one (from Anatolian Knitting Designs), so I really didn't know how they would look together until I started. Well, I saw it in my mind, but that's not exactly the same, right?

Anyway. Bezzie, I did wind that great big round ball by hand. It took the better part of an evening back in the fall. Do you know how hard it is to wind a cone shape onto a cone by hand?

Spring Break...

I broke through my knitting impasse and got my next big project on the needles. Perfectionism really is the enemy of creativity. Sometimes you just have to do something, anything, just to get the process started. The main part of this should be very simple and, I hope, striking.

I've finished spinning all the mossy merino/yak I had ready. I have more of both parts, but need to get Boris (the drum carder) from my friend Fern (the co-owner) to prep the rest of it. I'm very pleased with how it's turning out. I look at that yarn and think, "Yes, I can call myself a spinner now." And my brain is running circles trying to decide which fiber to throw on the wheel next. I'm leaning toward finishing up a batch of Shetland/black alpaca I bought at Wisconsin Sheep & Wool in the fall. I'm making a nice DK-ish 3 ply out of it. I got about half way through the pound I bought in the fall before I got distracted by other stuff.

Our weather today is just glorious and yesterday was lovely, too. Sad to say, though, that we might get 9" of snow in the next 24 hours!!! Just when we thought it might really be ending. Of course, the days following that will be warming up some, so even if we do get a big dump of the white stuff, it truly cannot last long at this point. Right? Still, looking out the window at the bright blue cloudless sky, it's hard to imagine where all that snow's going to come from.

Random stuff...

Some spinning:

I made the skein in the pic a couple months ago. I've been on spinning vacation for a while but am now back to it, making the rest of this mossy merino/yak, 2 ply fingering weight.

Both these pictures get bigger if you click 'em. This is a kind of hard color to capture with any accuracy.

We're slogging along through spring break, even though it just started! We're in full-blown mud season, which is a necessary evil along the way to bona-fide spring. But it makes our outdoor options a bit more limited at a time when I think we need outdoor time more than ever.

On a more random note, I've been musing about the term "stash buster" as applied to various kinds of knitting projects. Not too long ago I saw a hat on a very popular blog described as a "stash buster." This strikes me as a bit comical. After all, how much stash can a person bust with one little hat? I've been thinking about just what it is that folks mean by that term. One meaning could be a small project you can probably make from odds and ends you have lying around. I wouldn't call that stash busting, though. More like a stash friendly project. In my mind, stash busting would involve using a bunch of different odds and ends in a big project. An afghan made from scraps and partial balls would be a great example.

I'm kind of at loose ends right now in my knitting. I hate getting to the end of one big project without having the next big one planned. Until I settle on the next big one, I'm too unfocused. All the potential projects start duking it out in my brain. Hours and days go by with precious little to show for it. And having my offspring vying for my attention all day every day makes it even worse. I have the itch to create, but I'm stymied in my efforts to get at it.

Sloane Pullover Pattern Available

 
The Sloane Pullover features a strong cable motif down the center front of an otherwise simple design. Knit in one piece from the top down, Sloane features fitted cap sleeves and optional bust darts and waist shaping.

Knit from a smooth classic worsted weight wool, worked at 18 st per 4"/10 cm. Pattern written for finished sizes from 36-52 inches, in 4 inch increments.
Difficulty rating: Experienced.

Pattern available for pdf download. $7 USD

Springing along...

A funny from our morning paper yesterday...

In other news
I've been crunching numbers for the Sloane Pullover all morning. I hope to get that pattern done and available by the weekend. It's very close. I had to limit the size range to Small-2X. The numbers for the 3X and above just weren't working out for the geometry of the sweater. I feel bad about this because I'm generally committed to offering patterns for as many size people as I can, but this one would really call for a whole different approach to cover the largest women.

And it looks like the ground hog was right this year. We were predicted to have 6 more weeks of winter and it's looking a bit like spring these days. You have to understand that I have always considered it a bargain to get only 6 more weeks of winter from February 2. To me, that is an early spring. I figure, what's the alternative? 8 weeks? 10? 12? So, yeah, if we can be done with most of it by mid-March, I'd say we're doing all right. Last night, our overnight low didn't even dip below freezing! It's sunny, warming, snow's melting, birds are chirping. Yep. Spring is on the way. Of course, it could always dump a big snow on us right through April, but those late season storms don't generally last too long.

Now, back to work.

Various Updates

My quest for the normal school week continues. Owen was home with a bad cold Thursday and Friday of last week. By this afternoon, he was picking fights with the Little Emperor, so I knew he was well enough for school tomorrow. The Little Emperor missed some days of school week before last. (I think it was week before last: they all run together.) I know I'm not exaggerating when I say that we have had fewer so-called normal, full school weeks since mid-December than we've had weeks with some disruption or other, either for weather, or illness, or scheduled days off. And this coming week is the last one before spring break. Spring break which, inexplicably, includes the Monday after the weekend that should be the end of break. I rant about this every year, and yet, nothing has changed!

I'm not going to whine about the interminable winter. In the spring of 1993, while we were living way up on South Hill, south of Ithaca NY, about 1000 feet above downtown, we had so much snow that, for the first time ever in my life, I had that urge to go somewhere warm by mid-March. I didn't actually go, but I got the urge. It started with the Blizzard of '93 which shut down the entire northeast for several days. I think we got about 30 inches of snow in that storm. As February and March progressed along, we just kept getting hit: another 8 inches, another 10 inches, a piddling little 6 inches, and so on. By mid April our driveway was a narrow canyon bordered by 7' walls of snow. We lived on a fairly quiet rural road, so we were able to get out of the driveway safely, but it was still an act of faith. So, while this has been bad by Wisconsin standards, I've lived through worse. Of course I was younger then... Last spring we actually went somewhere warm for spring break. That was the first time in my life I ever did that. The only time. It might happen again sometime, if the stars align just right so that money and circumstances collide in just that perfect way.

So, since I last brought up circumstances with The Garter Belt, the site has gone back online. I'll be continuing to add new patterns to my blog as they become available and also adding to TGB when possible. There's still a lot of uncertainty in the air.

As for new patterns, well, I made a great start on writing up Sloane last week before the crap all hit the fan. My goal this week, before I'm launched headlong into spring break with my kids, is to get that finished and available. This means no children are allowed to be sick. I am not allowed to be sick. No big nasty surprises should descend from the internet and pull my energy away.

And I think our high temps will be above freezing the entire coming week! Now that's something to celebrate.

Diamond Hat & Mittens Set

The Diamond Hat & Mitten set uses smooth worsted weight yarn to make the adult-size set. You may substitute sport weight for child-size mittens.
Available for pdf download. Price $6

Swirl Hat and Scarf Set

The Swirl Hat and Scarf are worked in worsted weight smooth classic yarn, using the mosaic slip stitch technique.

Pattern available for pdf download. Price $5 USD

Sad news and transitions

The Garter Belt site is down right now, possibly permanently. Being a member of TGB has been a wonderful experience for me and I hope it will still work out. Many of you know there have been communication problems for the past year and a half. Thanks for all your support during this time.

I'm formatting pages to sell patterns from my blog, starting with my most popular items. Sorry for deluge of sales pages all at once, but they will shortly work their way down in the ranks. I will be putting thumbnail links in the sidebar, too. As I get new patterns available, I'll launch them here.

Shelagh Cardigan

The Shelagh Cardigan uses DK weight yarn in a top-down one-piece raglan construction. The lacy stitch pattern is easy, but it takes a bit of attention to get it set up properly. In 7 finished sizes, from 35-60 inches.

Available for pdf download. Price $6 USD

Foothills Pullover

The Foothills Pullover is a child-sized version of my popular Adirondack Pullover. Worked in heavy worsted weight yarn, in four sizes from Small to XL.

Available for immediate download. Price $6 USD

Plum Shrug

The Plum Shrug is a top-down dressy cardigan with lace sleeves. Knit in worsted weight cotton. Five sizes from 36-52 inch finished bust, with suggestions for personalizing your fit. Crocheted edging.



Available for immediate download. Price $6 USD

Adirondack Pullover

This classic men's crewneck raglan is worked top-down. A simple seeded texture is flattering to most guys.

Uses classic worsted weight wool.

Pattern written for 5 different sizes from 40-54.5 inches finished chest measurement.



Pattern available for instant Ravelry download.
$6 USD

Sloane (on a person!)

Finally! Photos of the Sloane Pullover on a human!

This is my friend Leslie who graciously agreed to model. The sweater is a bit snug on her in some places and not a great fit through the shoulders, but it gets the idea across.


I've been working on pattern writing. I had a few disruptions this past week, but hope for a full normal school week in next week.