THE OBLIGATORY CHRISTMAS KNITTING POST

Addie, with hand-knit afghan

I realize not all folks out there are the crafty sort and my posts involving winding yarn around a couple of sticks can be a bit dull.  However, it simply would not be the Christmas season if I didn't show what kept me busy during the last months of the year and prevented me from properly cleaning my house.  Despite what my husband thought, I was not simply watching the first two seasons of Homeland so I could lust after Damian Lewis.  I was also knitting at the time.  And if he doesn't watch out, he's gonna get that knitted d*ck cozy under the Christmas tree after all.  Or maybe for his birthday.  (My husband, that is, not Damian Lewis, who would probably find that gift from me just creepy.)

This was the first year for my mother's dog, Addie, to celebrate Christmas with our family.  Addie Banaddie, as I call her, was adopted from Recycled Doggies in February and of course she had to have her own hand knit stocking for the occasion.  The pattern came from Knit Christmas Stockings by Louise Silverman and has various options for the Pampered Pets pattern.  Full details of mine can be found on Ravelry here.

Thanks to Mr. Bean and his Christmas episode, it is a Christmas Day tradition that my sister and mother open a pair of hand-knit socks.  The yarn this year, again, came from my favorite Ohio family farm at Roving Acres.  The color doesn't come out right in the pictures.  It's the most glorious greenish-blue and wonderfully soft.  The pattern came from Socks a la Carte.  My sister, presumably because she always wears backless shoes like Crocs, consistently blows the heels out on her socks.  After reading an old Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern where she mentions adding nylon thread to wool for sock knitting and after hearing my sister complain that her el cheapo socks made from Hobby Lobby yarn don't wear at the heels, I decided to do just that portion in a wool/nylon blend.  Luckily Knit Picks had a color that almost perfectly matched the darkest hue in the Roving Acres.  We'll see how long these heels last.

My beloved Tristan, former abused dog and "child" to the fabulous Lori over at the Dog-Lbs. blog, has to have custom toys from his Auntie Shannon.  He got a turkey for Thanksgiving and a Santa for Christmas, both crocheted since I find that easier when doing things like dolls.  Yes, they're both odd looking.  I make them specifically the way he likes them, i.e., with unnaturally long arms and legs so he can play tug-o-war with his brother.  Yes, I acknowledge Santa looks a little like a rubber chicken. 

My sister I found almost impossible to buy for this year and her Christmas list was disgustingly small.  In desperation, I built a whole gift around a Kirk's Folly snowflake pendant.  The gift included The History of the Snowman, wintry-themed gift cards to JoAnn and Hobby Lobby, holiday lottery tickets, a knit snowman dishcloth (free pattern here), and crocheted snowflake coasters (free pattern here).  I didn't photograph the latter since my daughter, Foghorn, declared they looked nothing like snowflakes and more closely resembled "a constipated elephant."  (I find myself screaming like Seinfeld's Soup Nazi, "No knits for you!")  I put all of these in a fair isle tote bag in a...wait for it...snowflake design.  The original pattern was meant to be a gift bag, but I added a strap and flap with a button, figuring Nancy could use it as a portable bag for her crocheting (instead of the incredibly unfashionable AARP fanny pack she's currently using).  The original pattern for the gift bag can be found on Ravelry here and my notes are here.

The original

Last was a gift for my mother.  For her September birthday a year or two ago I knit her a lightweight shawl of Roving Acres wool.  It's gorgeous and she uses it often during the chilly days of early fall.  She commented back in October, "It's the perfect weight for this time of year.  Just warm enough."  That gave me the idea of knitting one that would be warm enough for bitter cold days.  After completing it in early November I then noticed my mother constantly wearing the original.  I said something about it and she said, "It's so warm, even on really cold days.  It's just perfect."  That made me grit my teeth a little, since I had a new, thick, warm-enough-for-an-Arctic-expedition shawl already wrapped and ready to go under the tree.

Appropriately called a study in texture

My mother does, though, claim to love the new shawl.  What I had in mind was something Laura Ingalls would have thrown over her shoulders to go and milk a cow.  Pretty, but super thick and super warm and more practical than the lacey blue garment I made before.  I was really happy with the way it turned out.  I used a wool blend yarn, making it machine washable and thus more likely to be really used without fear of staining it beyond help.  I actually paid for the pattern, which I generally don't do since Ravelry's full of nice, free patterns.  This one, though, impressed me with its variety of stitches and lovely cable border and the fact that a portion of the proceeds went to animal charity.  And for $4 in Canadian money, I really can't grumble.  The pattern is called a study in texture and can be found on Ravelry here.  (My notes are here.)

And I'm sure you're dying to know, now that Christmas is over, what I could possibly be working on.  Well, my son happens to love my hand-knit socks (just have to make that boy realize you don't wear striped wool socks when it's 80 degrees out...and never with shorts), so I'm using up a bunch of my leftover bits to make him a new pair.  I'm also working on an intensely boring, by hopefully practical, helmet liner (one of those hats that comes down completely over your face and just has an opening for the eyes).  The weather in southwest Ohio this winter has been ridiculous.  Major snow in early December along with painfully cold temperatures.  The kids already lost two snow days and would have lost two more if they had been scheduled to go back to school on January 2nd like some districts around here.  Schools were closed this past Thursday and Friday because of snow and frigid temps.  And another storm system is coming through tomorrow, with chances of 2-4" more, meaning winter break might get a little longer for The Inmates.  Since I'm Queen Snow Shoveler around here, as well as Chief Dog Walker, the cold and snow are giving me challenges.  I'm forever trying to wrap a scarf around my face and nose while out with the dogs.  It invariably comes loose and as I try to wrap it again with one hand and hold the dog leash in the other, the canine will spot a squirrel and jerk me forward and my earphones fall out of my ears while I'm trying to wrestle the scarf back in place...  I thought maybe a hat with full face coverage might be worth doing.  Unfortunately it's completely in knit one-purl one rib stitching and is so uninteresting to work that I can only bear to do it for a short period of time before putting it aside for something better.  I really want it done now, rather than Easter when it pretty much will have no purpose.  I just have to find the right motivation.  Maybe tomorrow's impending snowstorm coupled with plans to watch a Monty Python movie with my son this evening will do the trick.

FEAR NOT THE FAIR ISLE

I've been knitting for about 10 months now, having been a lifelong crocheter.  I've managed to work my way up from dishcloths to socks to (wow!) an American Girl sweater.  I lack the confidence to try a real sweater or an intricate shawl.  I also panicked at the thought of doing Fair Isle patterns or Norwegian patterns or anything involving more than one color.  I had read instructions in various knitting books and it just seemed too tricky, too complicated, too fraught with peril.  I imagined myself with strands of colored yarn going every which way, tangled and knotted and tying up my fingers like a straitjacket.

Enter Elizabeth Zimmermann.  I had heard her name on many knitting blogs and knew her to be quite popular (and quite radical back in the 1950s when she came out with daring ideas on the ancient needle art).  I have several of her books and she has a witty, dry humor that I love.  Her patterns, though, were as intimidating as the aforementioned two-color knitting.  They're more vague than I'm used to and seemed to assume I actually knew what the hell I was doing (which is never a good idea).  Now I understand the Zimmermann fan base.  I picked up Knitting Workshop on VHS from the library.  I'm assuming this was a PBS weekly series, produced in the early 1980s.  The tape starts with the basics, which I already knew, casting on and so forth.  She then had us start a hat and since I have a ton of wool gleaned from the Hobby Lobby clearance racks, I figured that was as good a project as any.  After having me merrily knit an inch of knit two, purl two ribbing and increase evenly around the hat in stockinette stitch, she announced that we were going to learn color blocking.  In other words...knitting with two colors.  Yikes!

I prepared myself for a complete disaster, got out a second color, and followed along.  And the result was astonishing.  I could actually do it.  Turns out it wasn't nearly as difficult as I had imagined.  It helped that she has a suggested technique, namely using Continental-style knitting for one color, American-style for the other.  (For non-knitters, this means that you knit one color with your left hand, one color with your right.)  The benefit is that your two strands of yarn stay separated, no great tangling of yarn and colors.  Zimmermann also has very specific ideas about what is and what is not necessary when color blocking and her advice made the whole process quite simple.

I started off with an incredibly basic little color pattern on my hat.  I was so amazed when I finished the first three rows to see that I was doing it successfully that I stayed up way too late that night finishing it up.  It was nothing to write home about for others, but for me I had painted the Mona Lisa.  Over the week I gradually stretched myself to try more complicated patterns (well, as complicated as you can get on something as small as a hat).

My incredibly simple (but awe-inspiring to me) first attempt on
the left.  My Sidney Poitier-inspired challenge a couple days
later on the right.

Thanks in part to Turner Classic Movie's Oscar film festival I managed to churn out half a dozen hats this week.  I had an unintentional Sidney Poitier film festival by watching In the Heat of the Night one night, followed by The Defiant Ones the next night.  (I'm thinking now I need to get out my own dvd of Lilies of the Field, which features Mr. Poitier's fine acting combined with him working on a church roof in all his gorgeous, muscular, shirtless beauty.  Sigh...)

The downside to all this knitting is that there are only so many heads in my family and only so many who are willing to wear hats.  (The Vulcan, my mother, and sister all turn down offers of hand knit chapeaux.)  Enter Bright Connections, a group working to improve the lives of Russian orphans in Kiev.  I found a post on JoAnn's forum asking for donations of hand knit hats and scarves.  Bingo!  The perfect intersection of knitting and philanthropy!  I need to get the goods to Sacramento by March 7 so they can be taken with them to Russia.  I'm hoping to have a full dozen hats done in time to ship them out next week.  If you'd like to read more about Bright Connections, please check out their site here.  If you're interested in donating your handy work, please contact brightconnections@hotmail.com.

For those interested in the patterns I used, the basic hat came from the companion book to Knitting Workshop.  The color blocking patterns came from another Elizabeth Zimmermann book, The Opinionated Knitter.  And I leave you with a quote from the divine Mrs. Z:

"Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage." 


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