New York Minknit

Blogging…something I apparently forgot how to do.

Pattern: Staccato Cowl, my own. I’ll detail how to make it below.

Yarn: Jade Sapphire, Angelwing Sport, 200 yards, 100% cashmere. I had a $20 gift certificate to Purl from my NYU Business School creativity project thing, and this was on sale. I think I paid an additional $12, so I think it was $32. The price tag says $46—yikes! Cashmere! I think it was about 30% off.

Needles: Clover 5, 16″ circs.

Project begun/ended: I think I made this in a month or so, just in time for the East Coast’s freak October snowstorm!

How to make:

Gauge: 5 stitches = 1″ in stockinette

1.) Cast on 105 stitches with a long-tail cast on.

2.) Join, make sure not to twist. Place marker.

3.) k1, *p1,k2,* repeat until the last 2 stitches, p1, k1

4.) repeat round 3

5.) *p2, k1* repeat until the end

6.) repeat round 5

7.) k all

8.) k all

9.) repeat rounds 3 through 8 until you run out of yarn. End on one of the non-knit-all rounds.

10.) Do some sort of sewn bind-off.

It is named Staccato because it has a staggered rib, like the way staccato sounds. On a semi-related note, I read that Rick Perry’s favorite movie is Immortal Beloved, which I saw in the movie theater, and is a semi-ridiculous bio-pic of Beethoven, starring Gary Oldman and a lot of hair. I find this a very weird choice for Rick Perry, but who knows? The power of Ludwig is great.

So, here’s my annual round-up of what I knit during the previous year. I didn’t knit Adam anything in 2010 (insert sad face), but I did get married to him, so he has many more years of suffering through knitted projects. HAHAHA.

From top to bottom, left to right, the projects are:

Garter Yoke Cardigan
Cashmere Tweed Ithacowl
Honeymoon Shawl
Scrappy Monet Mitts
Felicity Hat
Lemondrop Socks

I didn’t knit as much as I would like, probably because I became totally sucked into wedding planning and now am having wedding withdrawal. I am dealing with my wedding withdrawal by (a) offering to plan the weddings of strangers, with, as one stranger said, “the look of crazy in my eye” and (b) making the most comprehensive photobook of all time. I may write a post about photobook services later this month, which I hope will be helpful to other people trying to figure out which service to use. Anyway, I loved our wedding and our honeymoon, but now I am moving back into regular life, including lots of knitting.

I also started a new job at the end of last year, which means that I commute regularly again, which means more knitting and reading time. When I am at home, I always feel I should be doing something else.

I don’t have any real specific goals for 2011, except knitting more, which shouldn’t be too hard, since I only knit six things this year.

Before I do a 2010 roundup, I have one more 2010 FO to blog about. By the way, I switched my blog theme to match my personal website theme, but it’s a little tricky to comment in this new theme. You have to click on the post’s title to see the whole post and on the bottom there’s a comment form. Don’t let me blog into the void.

Pattern: My own. I cast on 108 stitches with a provisional cast-on with the smaller needle, knit 12 rounds, knit a purl round, switched to larger needles, knit another 12 rounds, undid the provisional cast-on so the stitches were live, knit the two rounds together with the second color and then knit 10 rounds of the second color (yellow), then 12 of the first color (blue), rinse and repeat. Decrease the top away, by dividing the total amount of stitches by 6, pm, knit 2tog every marker, knit one round plain, repeat decrease and plain round until you are satisfied. Also towards the end I started decreasing every round.

Yarn: Silky Malabrigo in blue and yellow from Imagiknit in San Francisco. I think I bought this in 2009, when I went to my friend’s wedding in September 2009. I love this yarn! It looks beautiful in stockinette and has a slight sheen and is super soft. Above is one of my favorite photos from that wedding that one of the guests took. The light is gorgeous!

Needles: Number 3 Knitpicks and I think a number 4 or 5 Addi Natura.

This is Ithacowl around my neck.

Project begun/ended: I think I started this in the beginning of December and finished at the end. So it took about a month.

Notes: I never watched Felicity, the television show, but I believe that she had a hat kind of like this. I saw everyone wearing these slouchy hats, and I wanted one, too. The color scheme was inspired by this random old French movie Diva (which the protagonist in High Fidelity considers one of his top five movies). I don’t remember a lot about this movie except that the titular diva had a very ornate sitting room done up in shades of yellow and blue on the wall, which I admired. Also, that there was a chase scene in a sketchy Paris bowling alley, which I think I’ve actually bowled at.

One of my co-workers has a beautiful scarf and she sent around the website for where she bought it (A Peace Treaty). There are so many inspirational items on it! These alpaca-silk scarves are hand-knitted in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, and according to the website, the designs were inspired by the Bauhaus weaving workshop:

Pattern: Smaragdi Mittens, by Liisa Lallukka. Free. [Ravelry link.]

Yarn: The main color is Frog Tree light fingerling alpaca in light blue, from The Yarn Tree, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Left over from my sister’s helmet hat, I had 1.2 skeins left over. It takes about .2 skeins for each mitt, so even if you had half a skein, you would probably be okay. I think at the time I bought it, it sold for $6. It now seems to sell for $6.80.

The contrast yarns are all leftovers, from bottom up. I’m not going to link, but if you want to see the original projects, just type the name of the project into search. I’m lazy, deal.

Greenish (cuff and 1st row) – Sundara FSM, from Honeymoon Shawl
Greenish/blue (2nd row) – Koigu, from Berkeley socks
Blueish-pink (3rd and 4th rows) – Traveling Rhinos, from Swirl socks
Burgundy (5th row) – Fleece Artist, from Burgundy Shawl
Hot pink (6th row) – Bonkers Handmade Originals, from Flamingo socks
Orange/green/blue (7th row) – Happy Hands Yarns Toe Jamz, from Loud Monkey socks

Needles: Size 1 and what I thought were 2, but my needle gauge also says are 1s. So maybe 1 and 1.5 DPNs.

The photos above show the mitts with the contrast side as the decorative motif and the one below show the side with the pale blue as the decorative motif, with the contrast colors showing as bands of color behind.

Project begun/ended: October 16, 2010-November 28, 2010. Each mitt took a week to knit, but I procrastinated in between mitts and blocking and weaving in ends.

Notes and modifications: I knit fingerless mitts instead of mittens–I did a row of purl stitches, knit a hem (should have knit a few stitches less to reduce bunching when folding over), folded over, and tacked down. My gauge was fine for fingerless mitts, but too tight for mittens.

The main modification I did was to use up sock scraps for the contrast color to create an ombre effect. Also, I reversed the patterns on the front and back (the mirror images) on each mitten so that the patterns would match when I wear them.

And for fair isle fans, the insides. Gorgeous, no? I recently saw a J.Crew sweater that had the fair isle inside as the outside. Looks woven and very modern. Especially love the thumbs.

You can see how I had some puckering issues on the hem.

So I knit the first mitt in a week, but then I got delayed knitting squares for my log cabin blanket, working, and watching tv, etc. Oh, I decided to make it a mitt because my gauge was too tight and I remembered reading this Grumperina post about how mittens have to have positive ease.

One side.

And the other.  Isn’t Central Park in Fall gorgeous?

Starting the second mitt.

And here’s a random photo of a creepily decorated ghost cookie. I went over to my friend’s house to decorate cookies (she is a professional pastry chef, hence the high quality of the base cookies). The odd decoration is all mine.

So when I was in college, one of my friends would always make fun of me because when I was over at her apartment and I had to choose a mug, I always chose the Monet one. She was like “I knew you would choose that one!” I was like, whatever–have you seen the Monet umbrellas? Anyway, I think Monet is one of those things that kind of gets eye-rolled at because of all the tchotchkes that have the paintings imprinted on them (mousepads, anyone?), much like classical music pieces that are overplayed. But the thing is that sometimes cliches are famous because they’re good. I tried to make a case for Pachelbel’s “Canon” at my wedding with this argument, but Adam was like “No. Too many commercials.” (Ha! I had my own Pachelbel moment…the song we used had the same chords as Pachelbel’s “Cannon”! Plus, I got to do a nod to my Phil Spector fandom–we did “Be My Baby.” I know Phil Spector is crazy, but I fact-checked a whole story about Phil Spector once and I developed a whole new appreciation for the “Wall of Sound.” By the way, I discovered this enormous list of songs that use the “Be My Baby” drum beat. So if you wanted to do one of those Wheel of Fortune Before and Afters–you know “Baseball Bat Cave”–you could say that musically, Pachelbel begat Be My Baby, which begat this giant list of other songs, including my beloved Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.” Incidentally, one of the DJs we interviewed cited Billy Joel as his guilty pleasure and I started laughing–I was like, “Don’t apologize, I love Billy Joel!”)

Anyway, when we were on our honeymoon we went to see Monet’s water lillies at the Musee de la Orangerie and they were truly spectacular (they were actually at Gagosian in New York earlier this year, but we didn’t have a chance to visit). When you see them huge and up close, they are incredibly emotional and moving in a way that cannot be conveyed by the coffee cups and other tchotchkes.

Here’s a photo that Adam took on our honeymoon:

This is a long warm up to say that I think my new mittens seem kind of…dare I say Monet-esque? I know, every two-bit knitting designer describes their creation as inspired by Monet. And then you look at their project and you’re like, “whoa, that is the ugliest pastel bit of knitting vomit ever.” Well, I know, but there is a nice play of color on these mittens. (The front and the back are reverse fair isle of each other.)

Should I make them fingerless mitts as I first planned or mittens?

Here’s my bag of fingerling weight sock and shawl scraps, left over from my socks and shawls. It’s so inspiring! I thought to myself, if only I had some fingerling weight solid to do some fair isle in. Guess what? I looked in my Bin of Stash, and I have a whole ball, plus maybe 20% of another ball of light blue alpaca, left over from the hood hat I made my sister. I am chugging along on these really cool mittens–photos to come tomorrow of the work in progress.

Pattern: Hamamelis Shawl, by Kristin Kapur, of Through the Loops. $6.00

Yarn: Sundara Fingerling Silky Merino, color: The Life Aquatic. This is from a Seasons subscription that I had in 2008-2009. Sundara is kind of a crazy cult yarn that is hard to get–Seasons was a thing where you paid her every month and then every other month you received a batch of yarn. You didn’t get to pick the colors, only a “season” of colors (I had winter). Anyway, you can get skeins of it from her website. It currently runs $40-$50 a skein. The website says you get 500 yards, but I think its significantly more. I had quite a bit left over.

Needles: Size 5 Lace Addis.

Project begun/ended: April 2010-October 2010. Only seven months.

Notes and modifications: I knit the medium size, and then I knit 40 rows of the garter stitch chart (chart 3) instead of 24. I was going to knit 48, but I ran out of steam. So it’s somewhere between a medium and a large. It’s a straightforward pattern though it’s not very intuitive.

This yarn is billed as a semi-solid, but mine was pretty variegated, so I wanted something with a lot of garter stitch that didn’t compete too heavily with the colors.

I don’t think anyone ever wears their shawl like this, but it seems to be required to show you the full knitting and shape. My body looks weirdly out of proportion here but I think it has to do with the angle at which it was shot.

I like to wear my triangle shawls like this, so it’s more scarf-y and less old lady.

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging recently. It sort of came up because Adam asked me why I hadn’t applied to be a Weddingbee blogger even though I read it ALL the time. (Even, I must admit, after I was married.) A small part of it was because I am a writer for money (though not here on my self-funded, three-reader blog) and I didn’t feel I wanted to write for a commercial website for no pay. The bigger part is that I am a huge oversharer in real life. I like to overshare about everything–even if I just met you at a dinner party, I am soon telling you about all of my life problems. But the internet is not the place for that–it’s a place for undersharing. However, what I think makes a blog interesting is when people are really personal. But how can you do that without oversharing?

I started a knitting blog so I could share my projects, but Ravelry has really efficiently created a way of sharing knitting information that surpasses individual blogs and Facebook seems to have replaced personal blogs in general. I have always read blogs on Bloglines, but now Bloglines is closing down and it makes me have to re-evaluate the role of blogs. I enjoy having a place to blab about what I want, but I wonder if blogs are still the best way of doing so. Sigh.

Anyway. Here is the shawl so far. I am SO over knitting it and want to knit many other things, but I must finish this shawl first, otherwise it will sit around taunting me:

Let’s see, what else do I normally blab about. Um, books. I finally finished a rather short but very bleak non-fiction book The Oysters of Locmariaquer, which I wanted to read after my Brittany all-oysters-all-the-time honeymoon. This book was the winner of the National Book Award in 1965. In addition to being a fairly comprehensive history of oysters in France, it tells the story of the oysterpeople in Locmariaquer. Every tale was incredibly bleak. In addition to working all the time and making very little money off an unstable business (oysters), the oysterpeople had these terrible life stories, many of which seemed to involve your only and beloved daughter being beaten in an oyster restaurant before committing suicide with just…one…oyster to eat. I think this book was hard to read because every chapter seemed filled with even more bleakness. But the prose is beautiful and often funny, plus I learned a lot about oysters.

Foooood. Here are some food photos, since this has now become a housewife blog:

I made this in the rice cooker after reading Roger Ebert’s book The Pot and How to Use It. Let me save you your money and point out that there is no need to buy this book. Adam got it from work for free, but it is basically this entire blog post on Roger Ebert’s blog published in book form. But funny and informative. Roger Ebert turns out to be hilarious and enjoys cooking everything in a rice cooker. You are not going to get a Michelin star from anything made in a rice cooker, but it will be edible and fairly easy to make. This is the Jubilee rice from Lundberg that I am a fan of, cooked with Imagine chicken broth, and reconstituted shiitake mushrooms (pour boiling hot water over dried mushrooms and soak for at least an hour), edamame, tofu, spinach. Plus Penzey’s spices, which I now throw into everything.

Banana bread from Cook’s Illustrated, I think the September issue. Yummy. Wait, I think I might have to get a slice now.