mamacate

More Momish than Knitterly

I found all these links from BlogExplosion in my site statistics. I guess it surfs blogs for you, and then sends other people to your blog--you earn referrals to your blog by reading others' blogs. I don't totally get "earning" readers, but that's cool, it looked like fun and a no-risk thing to try, so I signed up. I enrolled my blog and the system pealed out into the blogosphere, with me lurching along behind, presumably bringing me to blogs that matched my content and links. The first blog was a whatever. I agreed politically but was not excited. The second was a parenting blog that looked good but I didn't stay long because I clicked here. A field guide to annoying parents. Can I just say...YES! Needed that today, since Sara and Terry, balm to my "yes, I'm human" mom-soul, just left after a very brief visit.

I wasn't going to post today, but um, was it just me last night, having a dream, that the Red Sox won the World Series???? Did that actually happen? In a four-game sweep? Really? It looks like it did. Meanwhile, the Patriots remain undefeated. I have to say, I think this will signal an identity crisis in New England. If we're not long-suffering underdogs who root for the home team in spite of every reason to lose hope and give up, then what will we be? What will we do without a curse on our heads? Do we know how to be a region with a winning team? With two? How will we cope? I really believe this will be a challenge. We need that sense of long-suffering faith, that hope in hopelessness, because despite global warming, I don't think we're going to start having warm winters or anything.

When they were interviewing the Cardinals' manager (I think that's who it was--I'm really not a baseball person; the interest for me is more sociological) he looked like he was about to cry, and he kept saying "we should have done..." and "if we had..." and I was like "DUDE. This was an ACT OF GOD. If it was going to happen, there is NOTHING you could have done. It's like floods or locusts: your insurance does NOT cover this." He should stop beating himself up. Really, St. Louis, it's okay.

Well, I'm out of my depth with this baseball stuff, so I'll stop. But I'm in awe, nonetheless.

I finished knitting on the baby einstein coat (slowest. sleeve. ever.) but have misplaced the buttons. Sigh. I am ready to be done with that thing. Hopefully they are in the "reliable car," which Rhys is retrieving from the Rhinebeck area this morning.

I'm already on the second sleeve of Nick's. I got my GC's to the LYS (30% off, cool), so once I am done with Nick's, I will go get some Blossom to make Eloise. I think I will hold off until I have another FO, probably Nick's. My knitting/spinning corner is looking a little nutsy right now.

Back to work...I find myself saying that a lot on this blog...

UPDATE: Edited to add that, listening to All Things Considered tonight, I found out that Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, has been reading my blog. Okay, not really, but he does a much better and more eloquent job of talking about the identity crisis this sudden winning streak will have on New England. Go listen here.

In other news, I'm quite proud of myself for just calling 15 people and recruiting 2 volunteers to canvass for Kerry in swing states. I have also volunteered to drive people to the polls in New Hampshire on Tuesday, but no one has gotten back to me yet. If you want to make calls (it's so easy, and being on the east coast, it was easy for me to call west coast numbers late at night, after the kids were asleep), click on the Kerry-Edwards banner in my sidebar and then go to the volunteer center on the site. It's easy to do--they give you a script and the names come five at a time and they've all said they were interested in volunteering. All but one were quite friendly. One miracle down...one more to go. Speaking of which, check this out.

Klara Q & A

Thanks for all the nice comments on my Klaralaundry post. I really appreciate them. There were a couple of questions that I wanted to answer.

First, well, I thought I had a request for a shot of Klara *on*, but now I can't find it in the comments, so maybe I just hallucinated public interest in further viewing of my mug. Anyway, here is the laundered Klara being worn:

As you can see, it really didn't shrink much at all. I would say that the sleeves got a pinch shorter, and maybe the body did too. So pretty much more shrinkage in row gauge than in stitch gauge. I wonder if that is typical for fulling, which would explain my short fuzzy feet.

One commenter asked if I washed it in cold water. The answer is yes. I did everything I normally do for the gentle cycle: cold water, mild detergent (I don't use soap because it's even more alkaline, which encourages felting), and the gentle cycle. I also washed it all by itself, partly because the dye discharged when I hand-washed it so there was a danger of dyeing whatever was in there with it, but also because I didn't want anything rubbing up against it to felt it.

Jody asked if the 5% shrinkage I was looking for was about what I got. You know, I kind of thought that I did when I first laid it out, but after wearing it for a while (and I have worn it a LOT since washing), it has stretched out again, as you can see in the photo above, so I don't think I did get that much--maybe in the length but not in the width. As you can see from this picture too, it really didn't full that much: you can see my white bra through the stitches in front, sigh. Partly this is the stretch factor, but there's room for more is what I'm saying.

While I normally don't re-launder items that are fulled, since they will continue to full and get smaller and smaller, I think I will make this a machine-wash garment. I'll be very careful with it and be sure to wash it by itself, but it does seem to stretch out a lot after a few wearings. I should add that my 2.5-year-old son is very interested in pushing my buttons these days, and he's a pretty smart customer. He has figured out that grabbing any of my hand-knitted garments and PULLING really hard is a great way to get a big reaction out of mama. So I wear sweaters rather hard these days, sigh.

I'm waiting to see how Jenifer's Klaralaundry came out. Then I'll shut up about Klara and go off into the sunset wearing her. Until I knit another one, that is....

Baby Sweaters Galore

In other knitting content, I'm almost done with Baby Albert. I found some very cute buttons, and the manager of the store at Webs made a great suggestion about alternating them, so I have alternating stars and squares. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the buttons, but you'll see them on the FO in the next few days.

Here's the sweater, almost done.

I literally have like 10 rows of sleeves, then weaving in ends and sewing buttons. Any minute now, I swear.

The pattern, from The Knit Stitch (a book I highly recommend, even for experienced knitters), has you knit pick up stitches from the body and knit the sleeves flat, with the seam at the top. I understand why she does that--it means that you really just have to sew one seam on each side for the whole garment, plus it's really the only way to knit the sleeves flat, as the bottom edge is already closed. But I didn't like the way the seam at the top looked, so I'm knitting them in the round. It's a little annoying to be doing garter stitch in the round. You know, if you are working in the round, I feel you shouldn't have to purl. But purl I do. The needles are also annoyingly small, but it's almost done, and I think the parents of its recipient are going to be pleased.

My attention has also been occupied with Nick's Kureyon Jacket. I found an error in the pattern, but Carol Sulcoski, the designer, who also designed this and this for Knitty, was incredibly helpful and responsive in helping me with this and other questions, and got me a correction right away. So now I'm cooking with gas on the jacket. I did rip the whole front right side. It had a provisional cast-on, so I thought I might get away from ripping from the "bottom" edge, since I had already attached it to the back at the "top" edge. It was really only a matter of a few rows and when I tried to rip from the bottom I realized I would have to pull the end through the final stitch on each row, which got increasingly annoying as I went on and the tail got longer. It's good that I did this, too because a) the old front had a really big strip of pink that I wasn't sure I liked, and b) amazingly, the colors lined up perfectly between the front and the back (largely due to me making an effort to match colors when I joined a new ball), so it flows seamlessly now. Here's its current state; note the much-improved symmetry of the fronts compared to this.

Caps and Yarn Shopping Strategy

The timing of Knitty's Fall Surprise could not have been more apt. SIL is one week into chemo, and I think she's going to get all her hair cut off this week, before it falls out. It is time for me to make a chemo cap. I can't really decide whether to make this:

or the hat in this picture:

I have *almost* enough handspun, handdyed silk to make the spin-off cap, and I can probably fudge the edges to make it work (and I can also comb my stash to see if I have another hankie dyed with those colors--I think I might). The silk I'm using is on the right in this photograph. I may just use the navajo-plied dark-purple silk on the left there as an edging, actually. I hadn't thought of that until I linked to this photograph. Hooray for blogging, grin.

I tried to ply those 25 wpi singles last night, though, from a center-pull ball, and ARGH! Anyone who has worked extensively with silk (this was spun from a cap, so it's not the smoothest stuff), will be laughing right now. Tangle city. Plying from a single ball is frustrating with wool. Laceweight silk is just ridiculous. So I have to figure out another solution. I suppose I can try to wind off onto two bobbins. That would be the sensible thing to do, but last night I was just too frustrated so I set it down and went back to work on the kureyon jacket. A little easy knitting for a break.

So probably I'll try to do both caps, but I need to focus on something so that I actually have something to send out to Colorado when Rhys goes out to help her out during another treatment in 3 weeks. Given the uncertainty and complications of the handspun (not enough, plying nightmares, etc.), I think I will do the knitty cap. So, my question is this. Price is no object--what yarn should I use? I want the softest, most amazingly luxurious, completely un-scratchy stuff in the universe. I spent about 5 minutes thinking I would do it in the cashmere MIL brought back from Mongolia, but then I started working on dehairing it, and well, that's not going to happen anytime soon, lol. Any thoughts.

One more thing and I'll get back to work. I'm a total Webs officionado, and that's not going to change, but now that I'm on this Noro kick, I need to branch out, since Webs carries a very limited line of Noro (Kureyon and one other, I can't remember which). There's another LYS in town that couldn't be more different: where Webs is big, Northampton Wools is small. Where Webs focuses on weaving yarns, mill ends, and great-quality yarns that are reasonably priced, Northampton Wools is all about high-end and novelty yarns. Where Webs sells most everything on cones, I don't think there's a single cone in the shop at Northampton Wools. Even so, it's a nice store, and it's kind of a nice ying/yang yarn thing to have going on in your hometown. The point here, however, is that they have Noro Blossom, which Webs does not, and which I need to make Eloise, which I have decided to do, knowing that I need more sweaters I can wear to the office.

I know all about Woolneedlework.com, but they have exactly zero skeins of blossom in stock right now. But I realized that Northampton Wools is on the Save 30 store. You can buy $10 gift certificates to the store for $7. That means that the $10.50 skein of Blossom is just over $7, no shipping charges, and no tax on yarn in Massachusetts. Done. I've ordered enough GCs to get the yarn and pattern book, plus maybe a ball or two of something for a chemo cap (repeat plea for suggestions).

Annoyingly, although I ordered the GCs on Friday, they won't be shipped until today, so while I'll stalk the mailbox tomorrow, I don't expect to see them until Thursday. That's okay, really, since I'll be watching a friend's DS all day tomorrow, so with three preschoolers in tow, I'm unlikely to be doing any good yarn shopping, LOL. And hey, you know, shops are open late on Thursday nights.

Off to Walk!

We're off to walk in the Walk Toward A Cure for Breast Cancer. It should be a nice day, if cold.

I'm not a big baseball fan, but how can you keep from saying

GOOOOO SOX!

V. exciting. The kids have been really into reading a kids book we have that is based on the Mary Chapin Carpenter song "Halley Came to Jackson" about Halley's comet. We were discussing letting the kids watch part of the series, and I realized that if they win, it will have been longer than Halley's comet. Worth a little staying up late, I think. We have a softball field at the end of our street; a good one with lights and everything, so the serious teams play there; and they've enjoyed watching the games this summer. So they saw a few minutes of the game last night.

In knitting news, I'm working on a kids' Noro cardigan. I've had a few problems with the pattern, which came as a kit from a local (but not to me) yarn store. The designer has been incredibly responsive, writing back to me unbelievably fast when I had problems getting the recommended gauge and then to answer another question. Up until now the problems have been primarily mine (though I do think 5 sts/in is not an ideal gauge for Kureyon, although it is recommended by the manufacturer--perhaps my colorway is spun unusually thick). But now I'm almost certain that there's a problem with the pattern, so the thing is on hold so that when I go to the frog pond, it's only a matter of 10 rows or so, not half a sweater! I'm going to wait to hear back from the designer before I frog though. I might be able to frog from the other direction (there's a provisional cast-on right below the problem), but I don't have a lot of experience with knitting down off provisional cast-ons, so I'm going to try it before I knit a lot more.

Anyway, blah-be-di-blah, here is a photo, even though I've already wasted a thousand words, lol.

And here is a bigger picture of the colorway.

I was a bit surprised when it arrived. It's Kureyon #131, and from the online photo, I thought it was going to be mostly pinks with a bit of jewel-toned green and red. When it arrived I realized that it is mostly orange, with primary tones and then pink thrown in. I wasn't so sure I liked it, but it's growing on me. In my head, I'm calling it the "Albuquerque" colorway: it reminds me of the desert. I've also decided that this will be for Henry. In the world of insanely-gendered toddler clothing, there is NO such thing as pink boy's clothing. So I figure this sweater can be a totally non-girly item that has pink in it. I know I think too much about this stuff.
Here's a pic of the kids having "dinner" with their babies.

For more photos, specifically a photo-essay about the kids first haircut (!), see my new kids' blog. I'm linking from here to there, but not back, because I'm sending the other link to my parents, and well, see the posts below to know why I set limits with them, LOL. Anyway, http://mamacatekids.blogspot.com

Klaralaundry.

Klaralaundry. Hopefully this will come through clear enough online that you can see how lustrous the fabric has become. I can't seem to get DP to come take a pic of me wearing it, but this gives you a sense of what the fabric looks like now, which is probably the more important question. Nice, huh? I kind of want to make another one.

The real thing. Henry and

The real thing. Henry and Eleanor sang "baa baa black sheep" to this sheep. She seemed to enjoy the serenade, but did not offer up three bags of fleece for mamacate to spin. Wonder why?

No festival would be complete

No festival would be complete without a fried dough break. You can see the sheepy animals the kids acquired as well.

We didn't go to Rhinebeck

We didn't go to Rhinebeck to see bears or lemurs for that matter. Sheep! It's all about the sheep. Before we got up-close and personal with the actual sheep, Henry gave Bo Peep's sheep a big hug. First time around, Eleanor trembled in terror in my lap while I took this picture, which accounts for the angle. I'm proud to say that the next time we encountered them, she mustered all her courage and waved to the sheep. She's always been freaked out by costumed characters, while Henry has always run right up for a hug. They are such different people.

Lauren at Almost Felted wanted

Lauren at Almost Felted wanted to know why there were ring-tailed lemurs at Rhinebeck. Because there was a traveling zoo there! I have really high standards for zoos, so I was a bit wary, but after listening to the handlers talk and watching them interact with the animals, I was impressed. Here is a handler playing with a baby bear. They clearly both love each other.

Better Late than Never, a

Better Late than Never, a photo of the beautiful yarn from Martheme! Thanks for the RAOK! I am mired in Solstice knitting, and tempted to skip the mystery pattern and get another skein or two of the same color to make a sweater for my daughter. This is lovely stuff, a lot like Koigu. Yum!

My Tale of Derring-Do (for now, sans pictures), or, Klaralaundry

I made an oblique reference to my brave, exciting risk-taking behavior in yesterday's post about Rhinebeck. So here it is, my tale of excitement, of danger, of the thrill of the gambler's life.

I washed Klaralund.

In the washing machine.

With detergent.

Yeah.

I was loving the colors, loving the design, but it was just too big, and even though I got gauge when I swatched, I guess I was in too much of a hurry knitting the thing because I wound up 1/4 stitch or so off in the actual garment. I tried to block it so the sleeves weren't too big, so the body had some shape, but with my extra-drapey fabric, the blocking "fell out" after about 5 seconds of wearing. Gravity is a powerful thing. Just ask my bra. You can kind of tell how loosely it's knit in this picture from before it was blocked. Can you see how the yellow design on my shirt shows right through the fabric? And look at the light peeking through the sleeve fabric by my left hand. It wasn't terrible--I could still wear it--but it wasn't fabulous.

I hand-washed it gently, bathing it like a baby as recommended by EZ, and drying it flat. The yarn, which honestly didn't have a gorgeous hand pre-washing "bloomed" slightly, filling out a tiny bit more and gaining a miniscule amount of mohair fuzz. But it was still too big, too drapey, and too loosely knit. What it really needed was to SHRINK about 5% all the way around. And what's the best way to shrink something? Throw it in the washer, right?

Now, someone on the Klara knit-along had washed her too-big Kureyon Klara in the washing machine (and even dried it on low!) and it had worked out well. So I decided I'd give it a try. I had to do it sort of on the spur of the moment or I would have chickened out. So as I prepared dinner on Friday night, I just chucked it in the front-loader, by itself, with some health food store detergent, cold water, gentle rinse.

The hard part was waiting. I have unintentionally felted before. It was not a pretty sight. I recently overfelted a pair of fuzzy feet slippers. I know how bad this can be. And heck, I've already re-knit one piece of this sweater, I suppose I can knit another one. Not that I wouldn't cry about it. So I tried to stay busy, and managed to restrain myself from calling in a prescription for Xanax to get me through the experience. My front-loader does open during the cycle, so I checked it a few times, and though it was hard to tell, it didn't look like anything too drastic was happening. I did sit there a few times, looking through the window at it like Zippy the Pinhead, having this idiotic conversation with myself:

Me: "That water is falling RIGHT on it! This can't be okay!"

Me: "That's why you put it in the washer. So it would get a little bit fulled. You WANT some water to fall on it."

Me: "What if it's turning into a big mass of felt? What if I'll never wear it again? Sure, you said we'd survive, but who do you think is going to have to knit the whole thing again? Me, that's who."

Me: "Look, it's fine. Let's go in the other room and eat oreo cookies and hope for the best. Step away from the washing machine. Come with me. Really. Breathe."

I pulled it out gave it about 2 minutes in the dryer on low, but I couldn't find the sweater rack and I had reached my limit. I laid it out and waited for it to dry....and....

BEAUTIFUL! The yarn completely bloomed after going through the washer. It filled out the stitches and is a million times softer, more lustrous, and has a lovely but not excessive mohair halo. I have heard of yarns that need to be machine-washed to achieve their full potential (heheheh, didja get the fibery pun there?). I think Silk Garden may be one of them.

My lawyers have insisted that I include the following disclaimer. These results may be atypical. Your mileage may vary. If you choose to launder your Klaralund, you hereby indemnify and hold harmless mamacate from any action or complaint stemming from her account of her Klaralaundry. Past performance is not an indication of future return. Contents may be hot. Do not try this at home without a responsible adult present. These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA. This approach may or may not be safe and effective.

But if you do try this (and I'm not saying you should, really, I don't want anyone blaming me for their felted $100/30-hour sweater, really!), please tell me how it goes. And if you like yours as much as I like mine, I'd like to know. Jenifer is going to do something rather more sane and wash hers "vigorously" by hand. She's probably smarter. As usual.

In other news, Rhys and the kids and I are walking in a local Breast Cancer Walk toward the Cure this coming weekend. As I've mentioned here before, Rhys' sister was just diagnosed, and most of the women in Rhys' family have had it. Today is SIL's first chemo treatment. So if you'd like to donate to our walk, click here. And either way, if you pray or send good vibes, send them along to SIL.

Photos of the Klaralaundry, plus Rhinebeck, tonight, promise.