Pine & Ivy

A new knitting pattern must be something very special indeed, when a KAL (Knit-Along) forms on Ravelry several weeks before its scheduled release, solely on the strength of tantalizing photos from the designer's blog...

That is precisely what happened not terribly long ago with the Pine & Ivy shawl design from Anne Hanson of KnitSpot fame. The KAL Forum on Ravelry was launched March 12th, and by that time people were already buzzing with yarn ideas and color comparisons, even though the actual pattern did not appear until the 22nd!! A lovely photo gallery heralded that much-anticipated event. But the initial fascination had been sparked several weeks earlier by this entry in Anne's blog. I love the way she began by peeking in at the blocked shawl from behind some French doors. By mid-April, the KAL Forum had over 1,000 posts. There was just no mistaking the fact that an instant classic had been born.

I bought the pattern the day it appeared and cast on a few days later. It gives instructions for three sizes of shawl. I started with the smallest one (a kerchief or "shawlette"), but like many of the people on the KAL Forum, I soon realized that I would probably end up knitting the design several times in different sizes, colors, and/or fiber choices. For this first time, though, I turned to my old stand-by KnitPicks Shimmer (70% baby alpaca, 30% silk) in the "Bayou" colorway, a lovely rich mixture of dark brown and forest green with hints of both olive and teal. Normally with such a yarn I would probably reach for a 2.75 or 3.0 mm (US size 2 or 2+) needle, but I decided to take a bit of a risk and go up to 3.25 mm (US size 3), so that the lace fabric would really stretch out. Also, for a little added embellishment, I sprinkled in some 8/0 beads in silver-lined root beer (which has to be my all-time favorite name for a bead colorway), not enough to make the shawl an automatic trip to "bling city," but just to add a touch of sparkle that would still be suitable for day wear or around the office. I placed them on the ivy vines across the bottom border and the pine cone motif running up the center back, and left the intricate patterning of the rest of the shawl to speak for itself, as it were.

The shawl is fashioned from the bottom up, so you start by casting on several 100's of stitches (303 for the smallest size, 403 for the medium, and 503 for the large/tall). Counting and re-counting all those stitches can be a real challenge. In fact, a few people participating in the KAL got seriously frustrated at that point. But I was lucky enough to make it work on the first try, thank goodness. My usual method in such situations is to mark the stitches off in groups of 50 and then count between the markers until I am satisfied that I have the right number. I find that I still have to concentrate harder as the stitch-count grows, but at least the task becomes more manageable that way.

After a scant 3 rows of garter stitch across the bottom edge, you get into the the ivy border. This provides one of the most visually striking elements of the whole shawl, of course, but it offers some special challenges as well, because the pattern seems to be floating unsupported in mid-air. It also involves a lot of switching back and forth between angled decreases in both directions, as this is what Sharon Miller calls "knitted lace" as opposed to "lace knitting" (i.e. there is patterning on every row, without a row of plain knitting or purling in between). So you have to keep track of ssk/k2tog on the right side vs. p2tog/p2togtbl on the wrong side. Of course, Anne Hanson is a marvelous designer. Her charts are all *meticulously* laid out and paired with crystal clear written instructions that can be consulted in moments of doubt. But all the same, the directional stuff can get terribly confusing at times, especially for left-handed knitters like me.

Once I got past the ivy vines and into the body of the shawl, the knitting started to speed up noticeably, partly because the pattern was more straightforward (although that wavy section in the middle definitely had its tricky bits!!), and also because each successive row was shorter than the last due to the steady decreases. The shawl is exquisitely shaped to fit over the shoulders. I found that I had reached the top before I even quite knew what was happening, and the top edging was a breeze. The whole thing took no more than 5 weeks, and it was NOT my only project at the time.

Below is a gallery of the finished shawl both during and after blocking. The blocking process was fairly straightforward. I started by threading parallel wires on either side of the center panel, and once I had them pinned in place, began pinning out first the lower edge and then the upper one, point by point. The wings clearly wanted to curve upward, given the shaping. As I had hoped, the lace fabric made on larger-than-normal needles stretched out splendidly, and the various patterns really opened up. Its finished dimensions are 20" long at the center with a wingspan of ~48". I ended up using the floor of the computer room to block it out, because the master bedroom with its ever-so-convenient queen-size bed was unavailable. So our two youngest cats inevitably got into the act as well. The fluffy miniature tigress is named Wobbles, and the sleek puma look-alike is Quintus Nigellus. He came to us as a stray when fully grown, whereas she was a day-old kitten whom we rescued and bottle-fed. But I digress... As always, click on any of these photos (or the ones above) to get a closer look.

I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this knit from start to finish, and was especially pleased with how it turned out in the end. This is definitely a pattern worth knitting again in one of the larger sizes, perhaps even using more of the "Bayou" Shimmer that I still have in my stash.

Left-Handed Moebius Knitting!!!

What a HOOT!! Check this out...

Somewhere along the way in recent weeks, while trolling for small gift-friendly projects like scarves & neck-warmers, I ran across the Moebius cowl known as Harmonia's Rings by Sivia Harding. It uses Cat Bordhi's ingenious Moebius cast-on (YouTube instructions here), and I became so curious about what would happen if I tried the technique left-handed that I finally dove into my stash this morning and came up with some natural ivory Brown Sheep wool yarn that could be employed for an experimental run.

I had no trouble at all following the instructions and got it to work on the first try, simply by doing a mirror-image of whatever Cat Bordhi did. My lefty Moebius may be twisting the other way from the right-handed version. I can't quite tell. But that won't matter. It's a really fun knit, fast & easy. I'm using US size 9 (5.5 mm) needles, which are a real change of pace from my usual tiny-gauge stuff. Just click on the image above to get a closer look.

If this first attempt with the Brown Sheep works out as nicely as I expect, I'm hoping to make a second deluxe version of the same pattern with some mohair yarn that I have left over from about 20 years ago. I'll probably have to combine two different colors of the mohair, because I don't have enough of either one, so I wanted to complete the pattern in a single color first, both to learn the Moebius technique and to get to know the architecture of the design so that I could then decide how to place the colored bands.

If you can believe it, the pattern actually calls for a ring of *BEADS* around the neckline. Sivia Harding is nuts about beads, as she confesses in this often-cited Knitty editorial. I've ordered some special beads to go with the mohair (heck, it helped fill out the emergency order for the Queen of the Night's extra magatamas), but I'm not sure if I will try to pair anything with the ivory yarn or not. One of the topazes might work, or maybe I'll stick with a simple picot edging this time. We'll see...

Knit Your Own School Supplies!!

As I've mentioned in this blog before, I was obviously destined for academia from a very young age. One of the ways that we could always tell was the joyous excitement and anticipation with which I eagerly awaited the start of school every fall. August for me was all about books and SCHOOL SUPPLIES. I would shop for notebooks and folders and dividers and organizers the way other girls shopped for clothes. Not that I didn't enjoy clothes shopping too, in moderation, but I spent *hours* at the local stationary store — the real old-fashioned kind, a throwback to the bygone era before mega-office-supply chains (& alas now long out of business) — contemplating all the fascinating options and designing just the right scheme to fit my classes for the coming year. A shiny new notebook holds so much promise...

And the fascination never really wore off either. All these years later I still have a "thing" about notebooks and pads and binders, etc. I try to be careful, but it's like yarn: I have a stash (two of them, really, between home & the office), and I'm always on the lookout for new treasures to add to my collection.

Two years ago, knowing all this, my mother bought me a luxurious red leather folio from Levenger as a birthday present. It's specifically designed for left-handed people & immediately became a prized possession. In order to protect it from wear & tear while keeping it in daily use, I made a fabric envelope to carry it in. That worked OK but felt flimsy, so a few days ago I got the idea into my head of knitting and *felting* a better alternative with some wool from my stash.

It was sort of a mad experiment, but I had such good luck with lightly felting those sweaters earlier this summer that I was feeling adventurous. Here's the result...

I borrowed a simple mosaic pattern from square #18 of Barbara Walker's Learn to Knit Afghan, a book which happens to be lying around here lately because my husband has been working his way through it. My original plan was to knit the whole thing in one piece, felt it, fold it into a simple envelope, & sew up the sides. I even did a test swatch to plan for X-amount of shrinkage. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice & Miriams...

I followed what I thought was the same felting procedure with the piece itself, but the real thing shrank a LOT more than the test swatch had done. Grrrr.... Irritating!! With some effort I managed to stretch it out to the right width, but that only made it lose more length, of course, & when it dried it was obviously too short to cover the intended object. Fortunately, I had plenty of extra yarn available, which meant that I could quickly fashion a rectangular extension that could be attached to the original piece, and gussets for the sides as well. I felted the new pieces separately (obviously) and blocked them to match the original, and then eventually sewed the whole thing together, with a wooden toggle button left over from an old coat sweater. I *LOVE* it!!

The seam across the front is almost invisible. Indeed to me it almost looks like a deliberate decorative detail (3 D's = alliteration can be fun!!). And best of all, more or less by sheer dumb luck (the ancient Greek word is tyche) the colors match both the red leather folio and the dark teal green of my favorite messenger bag.

The devil really *IS* in the details.

What can I say? That thistle panel chart for Peggy Tudor is in a class by itself. I have done a fair bit of complex chart-based knitting in my day — including lace patterns that spread over several pages — but I've never seen anything quite like this. It contains 19 or 20 different symbols, at least half of which seem *specifically* calculated to create left-right directional headaches for someone like me.

Mind you, any malice aforethought in all of this must be attributed to the cussedness of the universe in general and not to the designer. There is nothing wrong with the pattern itself. Indeed the instructions explicitly state:

Reading odd numbered (RS) rows from right to left and even numbered (WS) rows from left to right, beg at row 1 and work the patt from chart A...

As long as you can do that, the chart is perfectly clear and unambiguous, with all the little devilish details put meticulously in their proper places. But as a left-handed knitter I always have to pay extra attention to what I am doing to avoid mix-ups, even with relatively simple patterns. So this is just an extreme case of something that I deal with every day. C'est la vie.

In the course of reworking the first thistle after my last post, I actually identified two more places where I had misread the chart. So I am very, VERY glad to have taken the time to work out all these little kinks at this early stage. Now is the time. It would be rotten to discover problems of this nature with the project any further along, that's for sure.

Here is the new & improved first thistle. It will need careful blocking of course (oh, really?), but I think the knitting is as accurate as I can ever expect to make it. Click on the image, as always, to get a closer look.

Nobody's perfect, but...

Can you spot it? Look very, VERY closely.

There is *one* tiny mistake in the first thistle that I so triumphantly photographed and put on display in my previous post a little while ago. One itty bitty 2-stitch cable that twisted the wrong way. I only just noticed it myself.

[[ Hint: the tips of the two thistle leaves are supposed to be mirrors, not echoes of each other, and they're both supposed to arch inward toward the stem. ]]

Sigh.

Now what?!

Well... All my well-honed perfectionist instincts are currently screaming. Sometimes I can persuade myself that no one will ever notice, but this time I honestly don't think I can let it go, not right in the first thistle, dead center. It's the principle of the thing, as much as anything else. If I don't fix it, it will prey on my mind, and this is going to be a very long-term project. It's too early in the game for me to tolerate that.

So I think what I photographed earlier today will simply have to count as a practice run, and that I will start over and really make sure to get it right this time. At least I've learned my way around that pesky chart, right?

In piam memoriam, Emmeline Grangerford

Emmeline Grangerford is a character in Huckleberry Finn who writes poems about local people who have died. Her trademark is that she always finds a clever rhyme for the name of the deceased — that is, until a man dies in the village whose name was Whistler. Utterly defeated by this, she is heartbroken and soon dies herself.

We read Huckleberry Finn in middle school English (7th grade, I think), and one of our weekend writing assignments was to compose the poem that Emmeline never could. I remember being totally at a loss until my father thoughtfully came to the rescue with the news that there is a kind of sailboat called a Thistle, which of course would make a person who sails one a "Thistler." Q.E.D.

How on earth can all this have *anything* to do with my knitting??

Well... The Caledonian thistle is, of course, a beloved symbol of Scotland. Since Margaret Tudor's first marriage was to James V of Scotland, in the hope of uniting the two countries, the sweater designed in her honor includes the thistle as well as the Tudor rose as a prominent motif. I was suddenly reminded of Emmeline today, therefore, as I contemplated the first thistle of my Peggy Tudor sweater, happily complete. You may click on the image, as usual, for a closer view.

This is an extremely intricate and tricky pattern, meticulously conceived with extraordinary attention to detail. Stitches are not only knitted or purled, but also twisted or not, and then there are cabled elements as well, with single stitches or pairs elaborately crossing one another on both RS and WS rows — all of which would be perfectly manageable, given that there is a detailed chart, except for the part where I knit left-handed.

Oy, gewalt.

Charts usually solve all my left-right dilemmas, because they can easily be read in either direction, but the symbols on this one were both numerous and specific enough that I had to consult the key to figure out what each one meant. That brought verbal instructions into the game (ALWAYS a potential pitfall for left-right transformations), and then I had to figure out what I was supposed to do at any given moment, depending on (a) which direction the pattern assumed I would be going for that particular row (RS vs. WS) and (b) which direction(s) I was actually trying to go and/or reading the pattern at the moment (since I sometimes follow the chart from right to left while knitting the opposite way). YIKES. It was enough to make my head spin. DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD, *UNTIE*!!!

In the end, I had to take a quick reality check before each little maneuver. "OK, hang on," I kept thinking, "what exactly is supposed to happen here?" Then I would make the stitches do what the design seemed to demand, rather than worrying about trying to rephrase the instructions to describe what I was doing.

There were a couple of false-starts along the way, and some minor mistakes that I had to tink back and fix, but I finally made it successfully through one entire pattern repeat. Phew. I absolutely love the way it turned out. The Nature Spun gives such terrific stitch definition. But this is definitely NOT a project to be worked on late at night or in an environment filled with distractions. Constant vigilance, constant vigilance.

Ever anon...

The Faculty Meeting Knitter (a.k.a. "Allow me to introduce myself...")

Alright, so once I got past all the dithering and decided to take the plunge and create an online journal for my needlework projects, choosing a name for the blog was no trouble at all: I *LOVE* to knit during faculty meetings. Far from becoming a distraction, the knitting actually helps me stay calm and focused, even in a room full of noisy people with Ph.D's, all spouting their opinions (hah!).

The faculty meetings themselves are basically programmed into my DNA. I am one of those academics who grew up in academe and never really left. My mother is a retired high school Latin teacher now, but she got married at age 19 right after WWII and only much later went back to school to complete her education and pursue a career. When I was a toddler (being very much the baby of the family, with brothers 14 and 20 years older than myself), she started taking classes at a local women's college and graduated with a Classics degree and a teaching certificate. My beloved late father spoke at her commencement. For he was an eminent church historian, who taught at a certain well-known Ivy League institution for many years.

With those beginnings, I made my way from the public elementary school to a venerable prep-school that required Latin from all its 7th and 8th grade students, and then to the same august institution where my father worked. I completed a B.A. in Classics (Greek and Latin). By that time, after 21 years in the same place, I was ready for adventure & decided to switch coasts for graduate school (M.A. in Greek and Ph.D. in Classics). Along the way I was fortunate enough to study in both Athens and Rome, before marriage and dissertation writing led me first to Washington, D.C. and then to Toronto. I deposited my thesis (via long-distance mail) a week before my 30th birthday. Mark my words: it was vitally important to make those two events happen in that precise order!! My first real teaching assignment brought me at length to the midwest (where my family originally came from) and introduced me to the life in the Big Ten. The bustling, crowded campus certainly had its charms, but I am much happier now at a small liberal arts college, where I can count on getting to know my students as individual human beings both in and outside of class, rather than as an anonymous mass in a dark lecture hall.

One last bit of shameless professional self-promotion before moving on. Earlier this year, my dissertation (much revised) was published at last by the University of California Press. As of today it is ranked #949,018 on Amazon.com. What can I say (alas!), scholarly books in the field of Classical Studies are rarely best sellers (sheepish grin).

So that's who I am, more or less. Now let's bring needlework into the story.

I learned to crochet in the 5th grade from a book that my father bought me which was specially written for left-handed people, and then taught myself to knit from another book a year or so later. Believe it or not, my first real knitting project was an Icelandic pullover done in-the-round. Nothing by halves! I still have this garment and even wear it occasionally, although it is really a bit on the small side.

On a side note, the stitches in that sweater are all slightly twisted too, because being self-taught, I had misread the crucial diagram and was wrapping the yarn around the needle the wrong way (clockwise, I think, rather than counter-clockwise — I knit left-handed, remember, so don't even try to picture this, if you have any tendancy towards dyslexia). All my earliest productions exhibit this particular quirk. The kindly owner of our local yarn store took me under her wing as something of a child prodigy, and it was she who finally spotted the twisted stitches some years later and helped me identify the source of the problem and fix it. The whole left/right thing still confuses people sometimes, especially novice knitters who are barely comfortable holding the needles as they themselves have been taught and get disoriented from watching me. But I am used to it by now. I read charts pretty much automatically in whichever direction is required, and the only trick is with written patterns that have a directional component (such as slanted edges or cables, etc.), where by following the instructions exactly I will come out with a mirror-image of what the author intended. This only rarely makes any real difference, of course (most garments being vertically symmetrical), and if/when that situation arises, it is not hard to compensate. We southpaws are well accustomed to that sort of thing in life.

But I digress. Perhaps handedness can become the subject of further musings at a later date.

At any rate, during middle school I would sometimes knit during class — only sometimes. Certain teachers allowed it, because I was a good student and did not disrupt the other students. Classmates muttered about special treatment, though, and I remember one guy in my 8th grade English class crying out indignantly, "Why can't I do my math homework? Miriam can knit!" I abandoned the practice altogether in 9th grade, when a particularly stern English teacher saw me knitting before class and demanded in no uncertain terms that I "put the Mme. Defarge kit away, please." Gulp. After that the knitting needles only came out to play during off-hours. I made sweaters and hats and scarves and an afghan or two. I also began sewing dresses sometime during high school, following my mother's example. She was quite an accomplished seamstress in her day, although I distinctly recall her dealing with her share of adversity too, when it came to needle and thread, yard goods and pinking shears. The infamous bound button-holes on that floor-length black cape, for instance...

So I knitted my way through college (hooray for glee club tours and LONG bus rides!) and then through graduate school as well (especially while riding city buses and BART, and travelling back and forth coast-to-coast to see my family during breaks), and on it goes to this very day. Needlework helps keep me grounded. It gives my "fidget energy" something productive to do, so that I can relax and let the rest of my mind wander, or perhaps listen attentively to a lecture, concert, or audiobook.

Therefore, since I pretty much always aspired to become a college professor someday, and since I had also learned to knit at such a tender age, early on I developed a mental image of my future self contentedly knitting away during faculty meetings. Through the years that image stuck with me, and now happily it has become a reality. That's why I think I just may have found the *PERFECT* name for my new blog.