Knitting on Impulse

April Hat

Yup, it's still snowing around here.

I designed this little hat on the fly, my goal this time being to come up with colourwork that wasn't stranded, because I know not everyone is necessarily into that.

 

And since single strand knitting doesn't eat up the yardage as quickly, I think I've got enough left from the Summit Sock Quintet for a co-ordinating pair of fingerless mitts. 

My complexion is not enhanced by copious quantities of orange and yellow about the face, so I used Daffodil and Orange Crocus sparingly in the hat, but plan to feature them prominently in the mitts.

 

Sadly, I suspect it will be hat and mitts weather for some time to come.

Spring Cleaning

It's that time of year, when a harried mother's thoughts turn to the choice between excavating her kids' room or tossing in a match and a bottle of gasoline and quietly closing the door.  As I suspect the strata council would frown on the latter option, I'm taking this week to do the former, and a stab at the rest of the house as well.

I really really want less stuff... clear surfaces, the psychological freedom that comes with uncluttered spaces. Four years ago we got rid of 80% of what we owned, and I really think we need to do it again. How is that even possible? We live simply, are increasingly disconnected from the consumerist mindset, and yet somehow our wee space is choked with stuff, much of which I don't even like, but almost all of which I fear we'll never be able to afford again (in the event I change my mind and wish we had it after all.) How do I reconcile the simplicity principles of a) making do with what I have and b) getting rid of a substantial chunk of it?

Part of the solution, I've decided, is clarity. Who I really am, what I really (really) want to be part of my life.  Accepting my wildly multifaceted nature as legitimate rather than flighty, shedding protective layers of pretend normalcy.  (A serious load of mental and physical clutter accumulates via the process of pretending to be normal.)  Packing up my invisibility cloaks and considering what might happen if the outside of me matched the inside. Mourning. Celebrating. Freaking out just a little that I've already used up half my probable life span and there is So Much I still want to do. Taking stock. (This would be the reason for the longish online silences.)

Figuring out what I really truly want to wear before picking up the needles.... like this cardigan:

 
 

I grabbed a skein each of the Water Magic colourways in BFL fingering... plus an extra ClearWater to make up the extra on the cuffs and button bands. I am knitting a simple, negative ease body, bottom up, in the round, to be steeked when complete.  I've provisionally cast on the sleeve stitches at the underarms, and will knit the sleeves down once the yoke is complete, allowing me to preserve the continuity of the striping pattern and make best use of the yarn. Having left myself little margin in the yardage department, I figure I'd rather compromise on the length of the sleeves than the body.

 

Stripes follow a 2,3,5,8 Fibonacci sequence. I chose 4 stripe widths for the 5 yarn sequence to ensure that each colourway was used equally.  I also fiddled with the calculations to find a width sequence that would repeat just about exactly twice - again, making optimal use of limited yardage.

Despite being fingering weight at 7 st/inch, it is proceeding remarkably quickly - I find the smaller hand movements do a great deal to speed up the knitting.

 Now, while we're on the subject of decluttering, and since I've been excavating rather than dyeing this week, how about a rolicking good sale? Stay tuned, I'll announce it via the newsletter in the next day or so.

Wild Skies Mittens

These were such fun to create.

 
I had a couple of goals in mind with these mittens:

Firstly, of course, was the challenge of creating a balanced design with equal quantities of the five Wild Skies colourways (a single Quintet in Summit Sock, in this case). To be honest, pink with blue is a little out of my comfort zone, but I persisted in the belief that nature does not err and the sky would surely have its own intrinsic harmony. The hot hues of Alpenglow are nicely tempered by Grey Day, while the somber blues of Twilight have a steadying influence on the bright energies of Dawn and Ultraviolet. The most brilliant colourways were allowed to play together only in small doses within the trim and mitten tips.

Secondly, in keeping with January's theme of Possibility, I wanted a sense of lavish exuberance, and I was inspired to that end by Lizbeth Upitis' wonderful book documenting the mittens of Latvia. I utilised a traditional sun motif as the centrepiece (as befits the sky), modifying the surrounding flourishes to fit.

The palms, however, were designed in a fit of pure whimsy:

 

The perfectionist in me can't help but conceed that it would be nice if all the letters fell in areas of identical contrast, but the design was intended to honor the spirit of impulsive ecstasy - that happy creative place where every possibility is on the table, and the work of pruning and perfecting still a long ways off. For me, it does exactly that.

Pruning and Possibility

Possibility is my chosen focus for this month, and I've been thinking it through a little differently than I have in the past.

The upside to possibility is the dizzying sense of abundance, a heady combination of imagination, ability, and desire - the belief that virtually anything could be done if I put my mind to it. (Sadly, I've had to let go of my childhood dream of being the first person to walk on Mars, but pretty much everything else is still on the table.)

The flipside to that (and I'm trying very hard not to say downside, but it feels that way) is that I can't do it all. More specifically (since my feminist sensibilities are bristling): while it is entirely possible to acquire many and diverse abilities, and even to practice them simultaneously, there are real limits to the number of projects that one can accomplish in a given span of time, and those limits are even more restrictive if one hopes to do them well.

As someone whose entire persona is constructed around the notion of the overachieving underdog,  who survived the first several decades of my life on the blunt strength of Never Never Never Give Up, this pruning of possibilities doesn't sit at all well. It feels an awful lot like loss.... like giving up.  As though every sweater not knit, every design not realised, every creative thought not acted upon, is a kind of death to be regretted and grieved over. Add kids into the mix (a project unto themselves), and after a while there seem to be far more creations thwarted than completed and anticipatory loss begins to dwarf the joy.  Toss in an overabundance of "sky's the limit" inspirational articles and a jealous look at the magnificent accomplishments of all those childless fellow artists with limitless round the clock hours at their disposal, and the whole notion of possibility begins to seem like a cruel joke.

It was getting to be a death spiral, and thus my new outlook for the year began with redefining my relationship to possibility.

I took an unflinching look at the real available work time in 2011 (rather startlingly smaller than the numbers free-associating in my head), set out my project dream list and began tallying up the required hours. The initial imbalance was on the order of 5:1, and for the first time in my life, rather than resolve to drive myself harder, I began to prune. I found it helped a great deal to reframe the process as decluttering, rather than loss.  I discarded anything with a whiff of guilt about it (ie. Use Up All the Seconds), set aside projects that were sensible but failed to really excite me, and gave myself room to explore and permission to stumble and regroup along the way. (It sounds obvious, but this is really breaking new ground for me.)

One of the projects that made the cut launches with tomorrow's update, and I've been caught up in a white heat of inspiration playing with it this week... so much so that I have to give you a wee teaser:

 

Annui

is the Inuktitut word for falling snow, more specifically, the mesmerizing dance of gently drifting flakes unhindered by wind:

 

Inspired by the gradual accumulation of enormous feathery crystals on the murky twilight forest, the design also echoes the light and dark duality of our winter landscape.
 

Light and dark, yin and yang... all places have possibility.
 

 

Knit up from two half skeins of Bluefaced Bliss Worsted (ie. a BFL Worsted Duet), Annui was designed to be graphically striking as well as quick and simple to knit. The pattern will be available soon, in 5 sizes, with an alternate graphic option for the middle size, and the deep ribbing makes it pretty much foolproof to fit. (I had hoped to have it published for the gifting season, but c'est la vie.) It has gone off for tech editing and after that, testing, and... the coordinating mittens are nearly complete. Fortunately, there's still plenty of snow left in the year!

Resolution Day 10/26: Ornamental

It's technically not an indulgence from today, because I noodled it up a little while ago, but I think it's blog-worthy:

 
 
The yarn is fingering wt BFL in Copper and Heathergreen.

I was inspired by the Norwegian book that Anne blogged about, and that seems to be taking the Norwegian knitting world by storm,  but since it's written (not surprisingly) in Norwegian, I figured I'd just experiment on my own.  It's a fun way to play with colour on a small scale.

Resolution Day 7/26: NotEvenCloseSweMo

I'm restarting a sweater. The sweater is a happy thing, the ripping and restarting, not so much, but as I've been too busy this month to get very far on it, the set-back is not tragic. (One would think I could count with marginal accuracy by now, especially when it's my own design, but apparently not.)

I started the sweater at the beginning of November after tweeting with ill-considered assurance about my SweMo aspirations. I even wrote a draft blog post intended for the 2nd or 3rd of the month... I can only presume that I was, at that time, repressing all knowledge of the coming hell.

Here's an excerpt (titled DesKniSweMo):

Swept up in the general zeitgeist and propelled by a burst of ridiculous ambition, I decided in the last week of October that I might like to do that Knit A Sweater In A Month thing. Except maybe up the ante a bit by designing and knitting it within said month.

I go on to discuss my existential angst over knitting the second, tweaked version of a design in progress instead of a brand-new idea, and whether that constitutes a violation of some universal contract.... all the while blithely ignoring the runaway train bearing down on me.

Back to reality now. I would like to have the sweater done by our as-yet-unannounced pre-holiday school concert because the colours will make me look and feel great when I have to hob-nob with all the well-heeled, ultramarathon-running moms. However, we have already established that knitwear is invisible where I live, and the event will primarily occur in a darkened gymnasium through a haze of sentimental tears, so I'm not really stressing about the deadline.

I'm working it up in BFL Worsted (my favorite sweater yarn); primarily in Coppergreen, with accents of Copper.

  

Resolution Day 5/26: Snow Edition

It seems silly, but throwing a thick, fuzzy, white blanket over the world really does help the inner darkness.  Superficial, simplistic, a surface solution... all those terms apply, but I think such things have a valid place, nonetheless.

 

 

A morning's worth of entertainment was had by tossing bird food into the deep powder. The Jays floundered and flapped about before retreating to the railing to hurl noisy bird profanity at our window.

 

The Whiskey Jacks, on the other hand, were perfectly at home in the snow:

 
 

In the afternoon, the kids and I wandered down to the Village to shop for a cousin's birthday, enjoyed the enormous snow clearing piles that swarmed with happy children, then headed home, rosy-cheeked for eggnog and a warm fire.

 

Oh, and steeking. There was steeking:

 
 I plan to knit cuffs for the spout and handle... it will have a proper FO post once complete.

PS:  Belated happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!

PPS:  Thanks to birds and snow angels and perfect fort building conditions, I managed the yarn update this morning. Details in the newsletter, for those who don't subscribe. (Hint... you might want to stalk the Seconds category over the weekend.)

Happy Season: 2/26

One of the lovely benefits of wickedly cold Arctic air is an unfettered morning view of the late November moon.

 

Two little indulgences today:

1) I started a small project.

 

Yarn: BFL Worsted in Copper  and Cherry.

Largest circumference: 22 inches.

Steeks planned: two.

Any guesses?

2) Cookies!

 
I grew up calling these Russian Rocks, but they go by any number of names. The not-so-secret  recipe (combining family tradition and the long out of print Pillsbury Complete Book of Baking):

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 cup butter, softened (go big or go home - don't even think about the travesty of margarine)

2 teaspoons vanilla (we get the best stuff hand-made from the Farmer's Market)

2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup finely chopped pecans or walnuts

1/4 tsp salt

Extra powdered sugar

Beat the sugar, butter and vanilla together until fluffy. Stir in flour, salt, and nuts. Shape into 1 inch balls and bake at 325^o  F for 15-20 minutes (they should be set, but not brown.) Gently roll in powdered sugar while warm.

Sneak Peek

I've been sitting on these for ages.... because it takes me forever to get through all the stages of getting a design perfected in pattern form and I have begun to see that is both lame and highly inadvisable to blog my best ideas months before I publish them. But it is a very odd feeling to not tell the blog what I'm working on, and since all that is left now is sending it out for test knitting, I think it is safe to show off just a little: