Babe in the Mist

I'm working on a Babe in the Mist in blue Berroco Vintage yarn for my new niece Natasha. There is a deadline 10 days from now, when we go visit our families in Chicago, but I think I'll be finished before then. Best part? Blocking this yarn involves machine washing and drying yet it isn't squeaky to work with (50% acrylic, 40% wool, 10% nylon).

This is a good project for me while I wrap up two upcoming patterns to be released: Sailor's Valentine and Mermaid's Cardigan should be ready next week! And then I need to figure out what comes next.

P.S. I'm writing this from the blogger app on my phone, so apologies for the lack of links. Adding them doesn't seem viable here. There's a link to the pattern in the left sidebar if you scroll down, and I recommend yarn.com as a starting place for buying Vintage online. It's a good baby yarn to try, if you haven't yet.

Kids Knit

At the end of January I started teaching Isobel, Stephen, and four third graders how to knit after school on Thursdays. So far it has been fun, a bit exhausting, and very interesting. Trying to explain how to do the moves that have been become so rote has been a good exercise for me, and the kids seem to be enjoying themselves.

I joined a group on Ravelry beforehand to get some pointers for how to begin. One great suggestion was to cast on and do a row or two beforehand (knitting into the cast-on row is pretty tough for a new knitter), so you can teach the kids the knit stitch right away. After a couple of weeks of knitting, we proceeded to the bind-off, which is really just knitting with an extra move. Then last week, once their needles emptied, I taught them how to cast on.

Honestly, when I learned to knit, casting on was the most difficult thing. For some reason I just didn't get it. I can't even remember what I did, but it was totally wrong. It took me about half a day to "get it". Luckily, I remembered this and told the story to the kids a couple of times, so that they would understand that it isn't easy if you have never done it before. And then, when you do get it, you've got it. Everyone managed to get it after some one-on-one time with me, both mirroring what I was doing and having me guide their hands to do it, and they all had that same "a-ha!" moment, which was fun.

Next week we'll give purling a try. And then we have a couple of weeks of Spring Break.

My plan is to felt all their swatches and learning "squares" so that we can't really see the wonky stitches and the times I had to decrease umpteen stitches to get back down to 20. Then we will give dyeing a try (or maybe dyeing first, then felting), and ultimately sew all our pieces together to make a blanket to donate to the Project Linus. That way all the hard work of learning to knit won't go to waste, but no one has to be reminded of the wackiness that is their first attempts at knitting. Plus, what would you do with a few wonky squares?

I started with a few skeins of Cascade 220 in Natural and a handful of bamboo US9 straight needles. I also have a bunch of the Pony kids' needles in US7 that we'll try next (there was a problem with the post, and the needles never arrived, so my LYS came to the rescue with the bamboo sets, but those Pony needles are great, since they are a little shorter and the two-color sets help distinguish what they're doing).

After that they will branch out into their own projects. A friend gave us some of her yarn from when she knit (she's a first grade teacher with a young child, so I'll cut her some slack ... for now), so we should have some fun options. Plus, we can dive into my stash (a little).

And, if you're ever feeling a little "stabby" about your knitting, as Bridget mentioned yesterday in the comments, wear some handknits to pick up your knitting students. Someone asked the kids what they were all doing together as we were leaving school, and they all proudly told him about knitting class and then pointed out all the things I had made. It was a very dear little ego boost for me on a grey day.

Comments and maths

Today, on top of the threatening (but not delivering) weather, and Stephen's stomach bug (at least all the doorknobs, light switches, and bathroom are now clean), I've been wrestling with the final numbers for Sailor's Valentine. It is a lovely sweater, if I do say so myself, but the yoke and hood took me three tries to get right, and making sure my numbers are correct and work across seven sizes is a challenge.
Plus, someone who knits pattern of mine started their project page with "beware this pattern", even though all their comments had to do with the way they like to knit sweaters, not that there were actual things wrong with the pattern. I'm all for Knitter's Choice, but this kind of comment bums me out because there aren't actually errors in there, just a difference of opinion. (This also means such comments shouldn't really affect me, but it's that kind of day.)
Here's an outtake from Sailor's Valentine's photo shoot at the Maine Maritime Museum last summer. I'm hoping to release the pattern next week!

New York

So, I have to be honest. Even after five years here, New York doesn't really feel like home. I think part of it is that it's difficult for me to dive into that go-getting pace with young children to care for. And not working outside the home doesn't help. I tend to homebody-ness so that I can be available when needed, filling my time with knitting and designing, which I live, as well as all the home making stuff that I like to have done but don't, you know, enjoy doing.

All this means that I don't get out to enjoy /experience the city enough to really feel comfortable. Or a part of. Today I had to go down to the Court House to postpone jury duty, since it became clear that I couldn't do it and take care of all the people who needed my care. Oftentimes, Nick can help out, but his teaching schedule this year and duties as chair preclude him from doing so thus time. Luckily, the jury room lady quickly postponed me to June.

But what really inspired this post was the courthouse itself (I didn't take any photographs in there because I didn't want to spend time explaining myself to security - maybe when i go for jury duty) and the surrounding buildings. The ones that stand out were all built about 100 years ago, and they are lovely and beautifully decorated. There is even an old firehouse nearby that looks like something out of a fairy tale.

Noticing the details really inspired a new fondness for New York. There is charm here and lovely little "secret" spots. Not just glass and steel exoskeletons and, at the moment, dirty snow and giant slush puddles.

And then there are the subway station mosaics. Maybe I'll dive into color work next.

Matryoshkas for Maggie

Maggie's Matryoshkas

Dear friends of ours had a wee babe on December 24th, but with our travels and their new home, we only got to meet Miss Maggie a couple of weeks ago. However, that gave me time to knit up a set of Matryoshka Japonais for her. Despite this undignified picture, Maggie seemed to like her dollies. I told her that she should play with them as much as she wants, and if they get too mushed up (Malabrigo Merino Worsted has a tendency to pill when loved excessively), I will happily make her another set. Because knitters love nothing more than knowing their knitting is loved/used. If you would like to make your own set, click on the button below. [Or there is one set available on Etsy, but if you're reading this, you're probably a knitter :) ]

Creativity

Sometimes we get stuck, creatively, and that's where I am at the moment. This interview with Jack White is interesting. He speaks to some of my thoughts on creativity that I've mentioned here before. Namely, constraints and structure, deadlines and a limited palette, rules, if you will, go a long way towards inspiring creativity. Think: "What are you rebelling against?" "What have you got?" Friction generates the spark.

I'm also wallowing in the end of an era by re-watching 30 Rock. If you're my facebook friend, you may have seen my mourning-30-Rock posts there yesterday. I'm still on season one, and there is so much hilarity, as well as incisive observations about gender and race. Plus, you have to love a show that mentions knitting in the pilot (even if it is a little disparaging):

Jack Donaghy: "New York, Third Wave feminist, college educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, over-scheduled, under-sexed, you buy any magazine that says "healthy body image" on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting for ... (pop) ... a week."
Pete Hornberger: "That is dead on! ... That knitting thing is uncanny. How do you do that?" -30 Rock, S1, Ep1

Liz, Jack, Pete, Jenna, Tracy, et. al., I'll miss you guys. But not for a while yet, since I have three more DVD sets to go, and season seven is still on OnDemand. Hoping for more inspiration and grateful for the entertainment (it's great swatching/knitting TV for me).

My To Do List

1. Create a style sheet (thanks for the nudge via your recent blog posts, Ruth) for my patterns. I keep a lot of it in my head, but it would be better to have it articulated in a document that I can share with tech editors.
2. Prep for the Kids Knit class I'm going to teach starting at the end of the month. Thus far three of Isobel's friends (third graders) have signed up to learn to knit. I think it will be really fun, and it's always good to create more knitters.
3. Create a newsletter. I signed up on MailChimp a while ago and have been totally putting it off.
4. Put together some sort of marketing plan. Obviously #3 will be part of it. I will also be adding my "catalog" to the end of my patterns that do not yet have it. [I finally added the rest of my patterns to Craftsy, which has been haunting me for a while.]
5. Consolidate all of my little sketch notebooks, whether this is into one big notebook or into the digital realm is yet unclear.
6. Much of the time I am inspired by my stash and tend to design things that I want to wear and/or that fill a need in my wardrobe. But that doesn't have to exclude pursuing yarn support options.
7. Prep for my book group dinner at the end of the month. I may have spent quite a while with Julia Child's The Way to Cook, as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Volume 2, and put together a little Pinterest board. We always remind each other that takeout is an option, but I so rarely get to cook new things, since the childrens' palates are somewhat limited. The wrinkle is that it needs to be vegetarian, which isn't that much of a wrinkle. I'm thinking French: gougeres (make-ahead!), pissaladiere (onions and dough in advance, bang in the oven a few minutes before the ladies arrive; roasted pepper strips instead of anchovies for the veggie one, and the little fishies for the other) and salad, and an ersatz dacquoise (really more of a pavlova with ice cream - there's a little Nigella Lawson inspiration in there somewhere) for dessert. BTW, have you read Wolf Hall? Love it, and Bring Up the Bodies, too.
8. Consider my hair. Cut? It's never more than a trim, and I have yet to find a salon or stylist that really does it for me here. Color? I used to do a semi-permanent box color every once in a while to blend in the grey (which has been coming in for 20 years now - sigh), but every hair color that I checked at the drugstore the other day has propylene glycol in it, which I am allergic to. Bleurgh.
9. Work out. Rejoined the gym today and am looking forward to a run on the track tomorrow.
10. Decide on my next knit design project. I've got a few submissions out there, but I'm thinking of doing something for Knitty. Their First Fall submission date is March 1st, which could work, if I can figure out what I want to do (see #5).
11. Oh, right, grade the Bloc pattern, get it to tech editing and pattern testing.
12. Decide if I'm going to visit the VKL Marketplace this weekend. It can be dangerous - there's usually some good stuff there. Maybe if I stopped hoarding that cashmere I got two years ago, I could get more!
13. See about doing some trunk shows. There are quite a few LYSes within driving range, and I have almost all of my samples.

What do we think? Lucky 13 seems like enough to be going on with.