I’m kind of in shock, over here. Hard to explain why–it’s more than just the fact that he knows the word “moon”, which I hadn’t realized. I guess it’s that, while he has a few words now, they’ve all been used in very rote types of situations.

In high chair + do not want to be in high chair anymore? “Daah!” (“done” or “down”, we’re not quite sure).
Picture of cat anywhere? “Meow!”
Presence of jar of bubble liquid, or bubbles? “BUH-buh!”

But this is entirely another thing. We haven’t talked about moons much, except for the hundreds of iterations of Goodnight Moon (he mostly likes to read up to the page about the kittens so he can meow, then closes the book and starts at the beginning again so he can meow). We weren’t talking about the blocks looking like other things, just building towers, knocking them down, and putting them on our heads as a goof. As far as I know they haven’t talked about moons or used building blocks at daycare. And suddenly a couple of synapses happen to fire at the same time and out comes “moon”. (Well, sort of.) He’s starting to be able to synthesize all the information around him and communicate in ways that have not been previously defined for him. And that’s super amazing.

I love this kid so much. 

First, the yarn.

This is some Blue Faced Leicester top that I got as part of Susan’s fiber of the month club a while back. Her club comes with recommended patterns, but I spun this at a point that I was in no mood to pay attention to consistency or spinning to spec. It’s worsted weight 3-ply. The yellow and green were separate colors, but I split the fiber I had into thirds, spun the singles, and plied it without worrying overmuch about when and where they came together (see: no mood to pay attention to specs). My thought at the time was that I could use that transition point as a point of interest in whatever I knit with it. That’s still the case, although I avoided that part of the skein entirely in the vest. I’ll use it in something else, though; the yarn came out nice in spite of my lackadaisical spinning.

This is some 3-ply Corriedale that I spun up a while ago. It was interesting fiber–might actually have been roving, now that I think of it. My mother-in-law has exceptional taste in craft items and found this at a farmers’ market, if I remember correctly. (There’s that thing people say about people with little interest in a craft who buy craft stuff for other people. It is not true in this case. Without fail she has found very nice stuff. I picked a good family to join.) It’s very bouncy, and a similar thickness as the BFL.

I was pretty sure that I didn’t have enough of either to do a significant project, so I hoped that putting them together would go okay (I had plenty, but wouldn’t have been able to finish it with one or the other, so I was right on that count.)

I looked over a number of patterns, but surprise surprise, I wasn’t too taken with any of them. I had a little old man sweater in my head–v-neck, with buttons, because anything I can yoink onto Theo while he’s running is much more likely to get worn. He’s not a big fan of the detail work of arms-through-sleeves, so a vest made sense.

One other element to making up my own pattern was sizing. Theo is what is known in the medical community as a “big guy”–tall and broad and sturdy. The patterns I found that I liked didn’t give enough sizing information for me to feel confident that their “12-18 months” was MY “12-18 months”. Instead, I did some measuring, and looked at how a bunch of different patterns approached armscyes and borders and things, and mostly winged it. I took some notes that my iPod ate, so I don’t have a ton of stuff to say about the pattern writing.

The green yarn had some slight variegation that was made even more slight by the 3-ply structure. It’s just enough to be interesting, I think. Any more and the unmatchability of the shoulders would have bothered me.

I bought the caterpillar buttons in San Francisco on a trip there mid-pregnancy; at the time I was working on this Baby Surprise Jacket and thought they’d be perfect. There’s a secret in that picture, though, which is that I hadn’t sewn on the buttons, and never did, because the kiddo grew out of the sweater before he had a chance to wear it a single time. But I couldn’t let the buttons go to waste. C’mon! Little old man vest with caterpillar buttons! The opportunity was too good.

The sweater perfectly fits the bill. He wears it quite a bit. I suppose it’s “dressy”; they’ve commented on his fancy outfit when he comes to daycare in it. But I knit it knowing it would get toddler messes on it, and having had the experience of knitting something that went straight into the “too small” pile, I’d much rather it get worn. And it’s not super fancy, it’s just a warm woolen stockinette sweater with seed stitch edges that he actually lets me put on him without kicking up too much fuss.

For buttonholes, I just did yarnovers, but they are still a little big. About half of them are popped out at any given time, but he doesn’t mind.

The size is just about perfect. The vest fits snugly but not tightly over his round tummy, giving him an overall impression of being a very tiny capitalist. The vest is long enough that I’m confident he’ll be able to wear it all winter, but not so long that it looks sloppy. It keeps him warm and cozy and doesn’t hamper his movements. I’m sure I’ll knit something similar next year.

So recently, I was spinning some fiber for a gift. I’d had the fiber for a while–one ply of the mahogany colorway, one ply of Autumn Sunset from Susan’s fiber of the month club last year (Both wool, but can’t remember the details.) I’d decided to play around with turning the top into some fakey rolags to practice my long-draw spinning:

When I wound everything off into a plying ball, I found I had about 7 1/2 ounces–this was from just over two very full Schacht Matchless bobbins. I had goofed around with the colors a bit such that things should slowly and subtly shift over the course of the entire yarn. For myself, I don’t mind multiple skeins, but for a gift it seemed a little complicated to explain that the recipient would need to cast on with this particular ball, then start in this spot with the second skein, to get the full effect. Easier if it was all one big skein. No way would it fit on the Matchless bobbins, though.

Hmm. Seven and a half ounces. That’s a lot. Wonder if I could pack it all on my widest-whorled, 1.4 ounce spindle?

Turned out, I couldn’t. About 2 yards from the end, the singles broke. This was a good thing, because as I approached the end, I thought to myself “Oh, curses, it’s not failing in any spectacular way so I’m probably going to have to do this with even more effing yarn someday to prove some pointless point to myself.” Thank Atheismo the yarn failed, now I won’t have to do this again.

After about the 6 ounce mark it stopped being entertaining and was just a slog. Earlier on, it felt like there was a time advantage to doing things in one piece, but the end was really slow for a few reasons. One, I couldn’t do a satisfactory thigh-roll on the short length of spindle shaft I had free. Two, the spindle was so heavy that inertia kept it from getting too zippy. Three, the spindle was heavy enough to be hard on my hands, even just while having the yarn hang from my finger, so I could only work on it for a few minutes at a time. The fact that the archaeological record finds the vast majority of spindle whorls to be in the 1-2 ounce range made a lot more sense for me after this. If you get too heavy, it just doesn’t work as well as a human tool. It’s still possible, just not easy–like a hammer with a really short handle, the form factor’s not right.

The final effect:

The cop is wider than the whorl, which I was proud of. See?

With T for scale (He likes spindles. I’m trying to raise him right.)

As a woolen-spun yarn, the thing bloomed considerably after washing, making it look even more enormous.

And a closeup to show the slow color shift from purple to orange to purple again:

A fun project but not one I feel the need to repeat anytime soon!

For the inaugural outing of the group, I wanted something that wasn’t too far out of people’s experiences but was still a fairly guaranteed winner. A longwool–Wensleydale–dyed by Boogie seemed just about right. (I’m hoping to try more unusual fibers and less well-known fiber sources, but I wanted to get everyone on board first.)

I gave the participants a long list of ideas, with a much shorter list of “recommended directions” (basically, I want people to do whatever they want, but if they’re having a hard time deciding there are some ideas that are particularly suited to the yarn and colorway). The “recommended directions” were: 1) Spin a singles yarn, 2) Spin for socks, 3) Spin to maximize luster. These are all things that Wensleydale’s likely to do well, with its long staple and sturdy/silky feel.

I picked #2, spinning for socks, and decided to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while and directly compare the wear characteristics of a 4-ply versus 2×2 cable yarn.

A 4-ply yarn is pretty straightforward: spin 4 little bits of singles, hold them together, add twist going the other way. A cabled yarn is constructed a bit differently. You spin two strands, ply them with a metric butt-ton of extra twist, and then ply THAT yarn going in the other direction again. What I’ve read about cabled yarns is that they often wear better (because there’s less surface area of each single getting abraded by my big nasty foot) but often feel a little harder if you’re not careful with all that plying and re-plying.

I want the socks to look at least somewhat related to each other, so I decided to mix the colors of the handdyed fiber as much as possible. The colorway we have, Swamp Monster, is roughly equally split between brown, green, light blue, and dark blue sections. I separated the colors out as best I could without being TOO anal about it, and split each color section into two minibuns of roughly equal weight.

You can see that the “dominant color” in each of those is just this side of theoretical, but it should accomplish my goal of maximizing the color mixing.

I’m going to spin half my yarn as a 4-ply, half as a 2×2 cable, and knit one sock from each skein. Hopefully after a winter or two of wear I’ll be able to figure out which one I like better.

So that’s one part of my challenge to myself. First 4-ply of significant yardage, first cabled yarn with a purpose. (I did cable this cotton yarn but that was all of my learning-cotton-on-the-charkha singles, cabled on a whim.) Part two of the challenge will be arriving on my doorstep soon. A knitting friend with a large family of spinning wheels is loaning me her Canadian Production wheel to try out, to decide if I’d like to purchase one myself. Canadian Production wheels are speed demons, which I find hugely appealing, and I’ll see if we get along.

For these kinds of things, he has a small collection of dice and the little plastic guys you see above, which had previously been held in a sandwich bag. A sandwich bag, I ask you. He needed something better.

I had this dice bag pattern lurking in my bookmarks probably since the original post in 2005. Dice bag, shaped like a die. Genius. I wanted a slightly more uniform surface, though, something that a tiny orc arm couldn’t poke through, so I decided to knit the bag and then felt it down.

A few things were made slightly more complicated by this choice. First, the shape of a d4 requires 4 perfect equilateral triangles, and felting shrinks fabric more in length than width, so I needed to fudge the knitting a bit to get nice shapes at the end. I went with my usual felting formula (shrinking to 60% of the original length and just over 80% of the width) and hoped for the best, since doing a significant swatch would have been about the same size as just making the whole thing. (For the record, I cast on 30 stitches and decreased one stitch on either side every 4 rows, and had a 3 stitch garter stitch border around all the edges to keep things somewhat flat.)

Also, because the fabric was going to be changing, I was a bit nervous about how much finishing should be done at what stage. If I’d done all the finishing first and then thrown it in the wash, I would’ve been risking a lot of seam puckering. At the same time, though, if I did all the seaming at the end I thought the dice wouldn’t look like one piece, just a bunch of little felted bits stuck together. What I ended up doing was seaming 4 out of 6 edges, leaving a sort of ice-cream-cone-with-a-flap shape. This gave the fabric the maximum chance to mingle and mesh, and minimized the risk of having the non-shrinking zipper cause some problems.

In the end, the fabric flap felted in a slightly skewed way, with the one pointed tip ending up much more elongated. The fabric was very firmly felted, however, so I just trimmed that piece off and all the other angles worked out well. The fabric shrank almost perfectly to my estimations (the advantage of working with a yarn that you’ve used for other felting projects!)

I kept one of J’s d4s around while I was embroidering the numbers on, so that I could mimic the font and placement as closely as possible. Incidentally, this was a Christmas gift and I managed to work on it in front of him without him knowing its purpose right up until the point where he noticed one of his die kept disappearing.

Here’s the result.

With the reference d4 for reference. It’s even the same color!

The zipper ended up being a tiny bit shorter than one side, but was still plenty big enough for its purpose.

You can see from this that I used the purl side of the felted fabric as the “public” side; I found it slightly easier to neatly embroider, and just looked a little better for this particular project. It’s a good size, actually could’ve been smaller and still had plenty of room. Apparently it was a hit with his D&D group, too.

The yarn, for reference. 450 yards, 2 ounces, a silk/sea silk blend, spindle-spun.

I’d also been looking at the Morning Surf scarf, which was featured with a bunch of different handspun yarns in the Summer ’08 issue of Spin-Off. The scarf was shown as knit from the short end, but I thought that turning the bubbles into lozenges for a scarf knit lengthwise would be appealing, and would go well with the yarn.

I knit the scarf on US 4′s, pretty loose for the fine laceweight yarn and made looser by the multi-yarn-overs that make the wavy pattern. I lived dangerously by knitting only the sketchiest of sketchy swatches with my precious handspun to figure out how many stitches I would need for a scarf of decent length, then unraveled the swatch so I could use that yarn (!). The pattern asks for a multiple of 10+6–I put on 206 stitches and hoped for the best.

Hell, I’ll say it. The best happened.

I had the yarn in two one-ounce skeins. As I neared the end of the first ounce, I realized that the scarf was already plenty wide for the filmy little thing that it is, so I cast off where I was. . . . .

And ran out of yarn about 190 stitches into casting off. In the end, I used about 3 feet of yarn from the second skein. Phew!

This scarf is one of those “block it to death to get it to look its best” type of patterns. Knit lengthwise, it’s also a “cast off as loosely as possible, no, looser than that” pattern. It came off the needles like a technicolor dishrag, but blocking really made it sing. It was a fun knit, easy to memorize and still a little different. With the bright colors and dainty yarn, it was the perfect choice to work on in the spare little minutes of an early-motherhood winter in upstate NY.

Now, I just have to figure out what to do with the second skein! I’ve considered knitting the same pattern in the usual way to show the difference in color shading, but who knows.

(Nov. 1, 9 pounds 10 ounces, Theodore Joseph.)

(knitting content! Don’t blink now.)

(We bought a house! We have a yard! This is the spinnin’ porch.)

(And now he crawls and has opinions and stuff!)

As you might guess, knitting and spinning activity has been really minimal, but not totally nonexistent. Now that we’re getting settled into this life I thought I might actually talk about some things I’ve worked on lately. What I’ve found in the past is that blogging stimulates my crafting creativity, and vice versa. So now that I occasionally have two spare minutes to rub together, you may see me around more often.

Is there really anything to be said about the Baby Surprise Jacket that has not already been said before? There are only over 12,000 of these on Ravelry. If you haven’t made one before, I encourage you to. They’re cute and easy and entertaining and pretty quick. My only modification was to use an i-cord bind off.

For this particular one, I used some Regia sock yarn that had been in the stash for a long time. I was nervous that I would run out, so I combined that with a ball of Dale Baby Ull, also stash-aged, that managed to be almost exactly the same color as the green of the sock yarn. This makes for one of the more fortuitous stash dives ever–same weight, same washability, similar colorways, yet I never pictured them together until about 10 minutes before I cast on for this project.

I knit the first 10 rows (5 garter ridges) with the green, switched to the sock yarn, and planned to switch back either 10 rows before the end, or whenever the sock yarn ran out. I like the way the green edging tames the sock yarn just a bit, but it turns out that I needn’t have worried about running out of the sock yarn. Now I have a modest amount of both left. If you’ve ever looked at two balls of sock yarn that just don’t want to be socks, consider this pattern. Knit on 4′s, the yardage for a typical 100g ball of fingering weight works out perfectly to a nice ~3-6 month size. (I’m estimating that size based on the baby clothes we have in the house.) Since most sock yarns are washable in cheerful colorways, I think it’s a great match.

I’m thinking of making a coordinating hat with the leftover yarn–maybe EZ’s garter stitch bonnet, to continue the theme.

The buttons slay me. They look very much like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and some of the colors are picked up by the sweater. Best of all, I picked them up in San Francisco while I was still working on this, which makes them a nice memento of a wonderful trip.

Perfect.

It’s a little bit bright. A little. Astronauts might be wondering why their eyes water every time they look in the direction of the northeastern US.

2 ounces of Fleece artist sea silk/bug silk blend, in what I’m guessing is the “Cosmic Dawn” colorway from looking at their website. 2-ply. 2 one-ounce skeins that are almost exactly 225 yards each, in another proof of my freaky robotic spinning. All spindle-spun on one Bosworth Mini.

I got the colors to line up by splitting the top carefully down the middle, and carefully spinning each little piece in order. I’ve been working on it occasionally since about February, and I’m thrilled to have it off the spindle and looking so nice.

The runs of color are pretty long, so I’m thinking of knitting a lengthwise scarf. A knitting friend got me thinking about the possibility of dropped stitches this evening–the yarn is fine, but quite strong, so I think the chances of tragic snags is low enough to give it more thought.

(Tragic Snags is the name of my imaginary nerdcore band.)

This is a rare skein of yarn for me–one where the skein itself is so pretty that I almost don’t want to knit it. I know it will look just as nice knit up because of the length of the color runs, but still. Just look at that thing. My worsted spinning is getting better–the shine on this is wonderful. The colors lined up without a whole lot of coaxing. The grist is pretty darn consistent. Every once in a while I just need to gloat about hitting one out of the ballpark. And this is me gloating.

Even if this yarn is bright enough to give blind people headaches.