Countdown!

I've got everything ready for tomorrow. The camera is packed in my purse (I really need to be a good blogger and take lots of photos). My copy of Whimsical Little Knits 1 has been retrieved from the knitting bookshelf, ready to be signed. I've decided on what I'll wear: My Snapdragon tam, and my blue Pomatomus socks. Oh, didn’t you hear? Cookie A is going to be speaking tomorrow, too! It’s going to be an awesome event, I just know it. In case you haven't seen the announcement on Ravelry, here's the details for the event:

When: Friday, January 14th, 2011
What: 4:30pm Ysolda will talk and answer questions
5:30-6pm Ysolda and Cookie book signing
6-8pm Artist Reception celebrating the work of Sonya Phillip
Where: A Verb for Keeping Warm, 6328 San Pablo Ave, Oakland, CA, 510-595-verb

I've got something to keep my hands warm tomorrow:



something to squish while I watch tv, waiting to get tired enough to sleep:



and something to tide me over craft-wise tonight while I decide what to cast on for next:







The color is best on that last photo, and the processing was worth every penny. I've got a little bit of plying to clear off the bobbins, and then it's going to be lots and lots of dark brown on the wheel for a really long time.

The only thing I have left to plan for tomorrow is what I'll be knitting. I'm a little hesitant to cast on the Veyla mitts, as I want something I can knit and not have to pay too much attention to. I don't want to be distracted by a chart. I'm thinking that perhaps the famous Ishbel in Verb's Creating or perhaps in handspun would be good? I probably would still be on the stockinette portion, I highly doubt I'll be on the lacey part Some Polwarth Wee Mushrooms? While I was rooting through my stash looking for matches between a Verb yarn and an Ysolda pattern, I was very much struck by how complementary they are! No wonder I love her patterns so much.

Oh, I forgot one more thing I have to plan: what to ask during the Q&A. What do you guys think?

An... tici... (say it! say it!) pation!

So here's what's coming up in the next week or two:

1. Tomorrow I'm having tea with some lovely ladies. Our purpose is threefold: eat cucumber sandwiches, gab about knitting, and look fabulous.

2. I can go back to Purl Jam on a regular basis. Hooray for no Tuesday evening class assignment this semester, and having my knitting support group back!

3. There are another few days before the new semester gets into full swing to spend time with my lovely Christmas present. (Note: this isn't my actual yarn bowl, but it's the same colors as mine.)

4. Blake is on his way back from Morro Fleece Works! As a refresher, here's a very blurry photo:



I heard back today that the box will ship on Tuesday. This ought to keep me from buying any more fiber like these batts or gradation spinning kits or naturally colored anything.

5. In exactly one week, the fabulous Ysolda is coming to Verb!!! I'm incredibly excited, and I have to decide what to wear and what to knit. For wearing, my choices are Damson:



Snapdragon:



and the Peaks Island Hood:



I'm leaning towards the hat right now, but mostly that's because it's the pattern with fewest projects on Ravelry out of the three. I got so excited last night when Kristine floated the idea on the Verb forums that I cast on some old stash yarn for Nathaniel, a squirrel-shaped cushion. That'll be coming with me to tea tomorrow afternoon. But I'm thinking for the actual talk, I'm either going to cast on for the Snapdragon Flip-tops in this yarn:



It's not the same yarn as my hat, but I think the color is close enough to tosh's Thunderstorm and the occasion of meeting such a famous knit designer warrants my first project in the delightful Hello Yarn Fat Sock base. Following similar logic (beautiful, functional pattern in an equally gorgeous yarn) my other option is another pair of Veylas, in another very special yarn:





... wait for it...



The most amazing angora yarn ever. I mean, they packaged it in individual boxes to preserve the fluffiness. I can hardly take it! But at least I'll have plenty of knitting to tide me over until next Friday.

First things first

I mentioned earlier that I was a little disappointed in how much knitting I did in 2010, as compared to 2009. A few astute readers have reminded me that planning and participating in a wedding does tend to cut into one's knitting and spinning time, but this year I will have no such impediment. As Brenda Dayne said in her final podcast of 2007, this year I will start as I mean to go on. So here we go!

Goal the first: Finish the g.d. blanket





I know three isn't really a large sample size, but I'm seaming one block per day at this rate. I wonder how long I can keep up the pace? Whether I keep up the pace or not, this really ought to be a reasonable goal to meet.

Goal the second: Fair Isle

Okay, so that's a really nebulous goal. But the fact remains that I purchased Fair Isle Sweaters Simplified back when I was still in college (2003? 2004?), have acquired four books of Alice Starmore patterns (only the easy-to-get ones) and Anne Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting, but have yet to make anything more complicated than a pair of fingerless gloves. I, like so many other knitters, have a deep-seated fascination with the technique. So I'm starting the year by cataloging my stash of Shetland wool:

Here's the leftovers from those fingerless gloves, along with two straggler half-skeins from the Squirrel Sampler mittens:


Here's yarn I have stashed away for the Polar Chullo hat from Twist Collective (which may never become the Polar Chullo hat):


Another batch of yarn, this time for the Autumn Tam from Simply Shetland (I have both tam patterns, but only yarn for the Autumn one):


And finally, some new stuff that I have vague notions of turning into actual gloves:



There's 30 colors, and at least three projects worth of yarn in there. This year, I will stop dreaming about fair isle tams and gloves and sweaters and am determined to actually knit some of the darned things.

Goal the third: Get serious with this design stuff

And for that, there are not too many more logical places to start than this:



Book and DVD courtesy the in-laws, who gave me a very generous gift certificate to the LYS I haunt whenever we visit them. It was generous enough, in fact, to pay for the book and DVD and something else besides. After flipping through the book for approximately 4 minutes, I learned two new fundamental things about knitting, and had one of my long-standing suspicions confirmed about the backwards loop cast on and the long-tail cast on. I have three days this week and all of next week to myself, and I plan to knit right along with EZ in my living room. Somewhere in the region of my lungs I've got that feeling of drive and determination that I used to get at the beginning of the new school year. Time for another adventure.

Obligatory Gift Roundup

This year's batch of knits, some already having flown their way to the four points of the compass:

A hat for my brother:



A hat and mittens for his wife:



A scarf for my sister:



A hat for my sister (this is technically her birthday gift, but her birthday isn't for several weeks and I didn't see any point in her ears being cold in the meantime):



Some fingerless mitts for a friend:



And a blanket for my parents:



Looking over the Ravelry statistics, I knit about half as many projects as I did last year and didn't spin nearly as much either. I was going to write another big retrospective post for the New Year but the numbers are a little depressing. I'm not sure what's up with the drop in productivity, but I'm going to think about it while I relax. I might have the solution for next year. For now, I'm going to give my wrists a rest and curl up with some tea and Sweater Quest for inspiration.

Raiding the Button Jar

I finished up my last official holiday knitted gift two days ago. Technically I still have other knitted gifts, but technically those don't need to be finished until late January.

My last holiday knit needed buttons, and I thought I already had the perfect ones, but turns out I only had four and the project needs eight. We were spending Christmas Eve and the day before with the husbeast's family, and I was puzzling over whether to walk downtown and see if the LYS was open when I remembered his mom keeps a button jar.



After dumping out the whole thing, I started by weeding out buttons that were too large or obviously wrong (for example, metallic with embossed anchors). After also putting back buttons that did not come in a set of eight and seriously considering the possibility of using deliberately mis-matched buttons, I was left with three choices. I picked my favorite, stuffed them in my pocket, and walked down to the LYS anyway to review their options. They were indeed open, and I had to talk myself down from purchasing several pattern books (has anyone else noticed that Aran Knitting is back in print?). But I still liked the button jar buttons better than anything the LYS had to offer.

I walked back to the house, pleased at my own frugality, and sewed the buttons on while the husbeast's aunt baked up a storm of cookies and we caught up on life. The husbeast was incredibly happy to have me by his side for this part of his family's holiday traditions.

I'm working on my last knitted gift today, and thinking about how things in our lives grow and change. I was also thinking about Stephanie's post about the solstice and lunar eclipse, which I did not get to see due to bad weather. Endings are sometimes a necessary (and healthy) part of life, and this year has had a lot of endings for me and the people around me. But those endings have been good endings, the natural death of an old part of my life.

This year, I won't be spending Christmas Eve at the church I grew up with, or Christmas morning opening presents with my parents and siblings. Change can make me anxious, exhilarated, energized, but rarely does it bring the sense of calm I find myself searching for at this time of year. This year is the first year I stuffed a wrapping paper bow on my own cat and attempted to take his photo, and the first year I got to spend the holiday with my new chosen family instead of settling for a phone conversation peppered with "I miss you so much." I don't know that I can say it's the happiest Christmas I've ever had (there was the year I got a telescope for Christmas), but it's been Christmas times three. Today is the calm in the middle of all the traveling. And I hope all of you get some calm, peaceful, reflective time in your holiday as well as this season turns around and the calendar turns over.

The Holidays Are Here Again

and not everyone is happy about that.



But, there are upshots.



Starbuck has mixed feelings about the holidays. On the one hand, the humans have provided him with a toy tree. On the other hand, they keep trying to put that stupid hat on him.



I am zipping through my holiday knitting, which is good because I forgot that some of it needs to be ready to be shipped to North Dakota BEFORE Dec. 25th. I'm still playing the priority game (first knitting those gifts which will be given first), which has worked well in the past. We regularly exchange gifts three times a year (and this time it will be four), so there's a fair amount of wiggle room given that some projects must be finished by the 25th, some by the 26th, and some not until the 31st. I also cut down the list a bit this year, so even though everyone is getting something handmade, they are not all getting knits. Another help was the Bazaar Bizarre. Like a bad blogger I went and forgot my camera, but the new venue at Fort Mason was awesome (way less crowded). I ended up going on both days, and the husbeast and I picked our tree out from the Guardsmen Tree Lot on the next pier over. We loved getting our tree there and will certainly go back there next year. I probably spent more money than I should have, but I loved seeing some familiar faces.

Lastly, I wanted to say how happy it makes me to see all the Ravelers who have added the Sluggish Mushroom mittens to their favorites. It was a little heart-stopping to wake up the day after I posted the pattern and find so many hearts! You can now buy the pattern directly off the blog in the right-hand sidebar, in case you're a knitter who is not on Ravelry. Thanks everyone!

There and Back Again

As I get older and gain the ability to take a very long view, I'm starting to see themes emerge in my life. Not everything is cyclical, but some things sure are. We return to places and people we find comfortable. Sometimes it's a rut, but sometimes it's a return to a problem, puzzle, or challenge.

Okay, enough with being all cryptic, I am going somewhere with this and I should get down to it. Several weeks ago, I realized that I would be sadly unable to attend Adrian's fabulous Mitten School. I was trying to think of something fibery I could do, or something I could splurge on to console myself. Something that was less expensive than a plane ticket to Kansas, but would present a learning opportunity (as Mitten School certainly would have done). And I got to thinking about Kristine's mitten contest from last year, and how it wasn't happening this year because they've just moved to a fabulous new store.

Hey! What about the failed initial mitten design from the contest? The two- five-color Arts & Crafts Tile-inspired one? Couldn't I do something with that? The idea hit me and stuck like a bad tv commercial jingle. If I wrote another mitten pattern I'd be working on mittens and feel a bit better about not attending the workshop. Furthermore, a small part of my brain started telling me that if my pattern turned out to be popular, I'd feel even better about not going to the workshop because it would be proof that I didn't really need instruction on how to knit mittens. Well, at this point I starting feeling bad about that little selfish egotistical part of my brain and all its ungrateful thoughts about education. Of course I could have gotten something valuable out of the workshop, and even making up a new mitten pattern wouldn't change that (no matter how wildly popular it ended up being).

I dug out all my old notes from the mitten contest, and starting thinking about more mittens. I pulled out all the mittens I've ever knit, and starting thinking more about things like thumb length, gauge, and the like. I asked myself: just how pointy do I like the tops of mittens to be? I figured that this year, I would try to draw more inspiration from Adrian's mitten patterns, which all have this whimsical vintage quality that I just adore. No external deadlines this year, only self-imposed ones. If everything went according to plan, I should have another pattern ready in time for the holidays. And I really liked the idea of making a new pattern every year. Maybe next year I won't do mittens, or maybe I will, I thought. But for this year, I give you the Sluggish Mushroom mittens:




I kept putting off taking photos of these mittens. I was a little apprehensive about publishing the pattern right away, because many of my test knitters (who knew that the mitten pattern is supposed to look like mushrooms) had friends or strangers commenting on their lovely jellyfish mittens! So I waited and waiting, trying to decide if I wanted to literally go back to the drawing board and try again with the chart. And then I decided that, like a good book, the individual knitter's interpretation and experience that they bring to the pattern are part of what makes the creative process so rewarding and fulfilling on both ends. So it can be like one of those optical illusion pictures. One way it's a duck, one way it's a guy with a big nose. But just in case, I decided I should take pictures with lots of mushrooms around the finished product.



It was overcast and drizzly today, and a short stroll through the park rewarded us with a nice little colony of mushrooms. The husbeast was helping me photograph, and after we had both finished taking shots of the mittens lying flat I pulled one pair on my hands to get some photos of them on a human being. While I was putting my camera away, he spotted a slug and I started saying "ohmygodohmygodnowaynowaynoway!" in a high-pitched voice.



Perfection.

Now down to the details. The pattern is available for sale both on Ravelry and directly here if you're not on Ravelry (just click the "buy now" button above). I would like to sincerely thank my test knitters for all their help and feedback.



It's very nice as a designer when the process shifts from a solitary one to a social one. I loved their color choices and seeing the pattern come to life.



They were the ones that really encouraged me to publish the pattern before the holidays, and it's always nice to hear someone tell you that although the task ahead might be hard, that they will help you out and believe you can complete it.



Thanks Eujean2, TK, PinkViking, Firesarah, and everybody else at Purl Jam for everything. I couldn't have done it without you.