Tag Archives: knitting

what i did on my staycation

{03 January 2011}

1. finished geneva’s Christmas Coat just in time for Belated Christmas on the 2nd. i’ve been working on this coat since July. the last week it got all sweatshop up in here; every night ben would go to bed at 10 or 11 and then i’d stay up till 2 or 3 working on the coat [kept company by item 2 on this list]. when Geneva, being two years old, opened the box she pulled out the tissue paper, threw it behind her, then pulled out the coat, threw it behind her, then looked, disappointed, into the empty box in search of her actual gift. when pressed to try it on she threw a fit, so her poor cousin Grant was imposed upon to model the coat instead.

2. watched season one and started season two of The Tudors. i know, all the boobs, its ridiculous, but i so love frock dramas. those dresses! and i confess that by season two i was totally dorking out on the history. i’ve been reading the wikipedia entries on all the historical figures. Anne Bolyen is kind of getting a bad rap, i think. but Katherine of Aragon was a pretty cool woman and she totally got the shaft. i’ll let you know what i think of Jane Seymour when i get there.

3. replaced our thermostat with a programmable one. yeah, girl power!

4. decided i’d take on the 100 days challenge as a way to get my sorry butt back in gear. i was training for a half marathon all fall, but two weeks before the race when i realized that i had forgotten to register and the race was now sold out, my motivation went zinging out the window and my running shoes crawled into a closet where they’ve been ignored for all of december. the deal with the 100 days of fitness is that it just requires 30 minute of any kind of exercise a day. any kind. seriously. as in, i played DDR for 30 minutes today. tomorrow i’m back to the gym, i swear.

5. played DDR and called it exercise [see item 4]. i know that DDR is soooo 2002, but i’ve only just now acquired one thanks to a regifted Wii and DDR game mat i received at Belated Christmas [see item 1].

6. i baked. oh, i baked. new year’s day challah (Smitten Kitchen) (goes stale quickly, but makes excellent french toast the next day), buttermilk waffles (Bittman, Everything Vegetarian) (the extra freeze beautifully), a loaf of our favorite no-knead bread (Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery). there was also a failed loaf of bread-machine bread [see item 7]. the bread machine seems to be fine for making white bread, but wheat bread just causes it to seize up and produce dense, gummy lumps instead of loaves of bread. there were plans in the works for a flourless chocolate cake for new years’ eve, too, but it just didn’t happen. sometime this week, it will, and it will be amazing. just wait.

7. kicked the bread machine to the proverbial curb. i had decided a while back that i had to learn to bake bread by hand before i could consider a bread machine. there’s been plenty of failures this fall, but i think i’m getting a pretty good handle on it now. enough that i was willing to experiment with the breadmaker. my sister-in-law was kind enough to loan us her bread maker so i could decide if i wanted to own one. the answer is no. it takes up way too much space on the counter, the bread is sub-standard, and it’s kind of annoyingly loud. i’m unimpressed. i think we’ll stick with making it the old fashioned way.

8. welcomed the new year in a low-key manner, narrowly beating Ben at scrabble just after midnight at our local, the goodly Albatross.

9. did not write holiday cards. i had SUCH good intentions this year, i swear. i carried those holiday cards around in my messenger bag for weeks, always sure i’d find some time to sit down and write. i only managed to squeak out about three of them. even the week after Christmas i fully intended to write cards, since they’re holiday cards i have all the way to new years day, right? and now it’s the fourth and it’s starting to seem ridiculous to send cards. i love you all. i do.

10. introduced Ben to Slings & Arrows (which is finally available to stream off Netflix!) it’s a wonderfully obscure 18-episode Canadian comedy series about the inner workings of shakespeare festival theatre. i know, a narrow audience, but imagine how you’d feel about The Office if you actually worked for a paper company.

11. started another Vegetarian January. last year Ben volunteered to try it with me, but he was brought down by a prosciutto pizza 8 days in. this year he didn’t even consider it. still, the overall meat consumption goes way down in our house not just for january but for probably half the year as a result of the Vegetarian Januaries, so i think it’s a good thing.

baby vikings

{23 June 2010}

so much to blog! so little time to blog it.

trips galore (soCal, canada/alaska, chicago), and the apartment hunt and moving (on monday, holy crap!) and coming up on officially one year in california. but in the mean time i present to you: the chicken viking baby hat. no more ribbon-trimmed booties for me. be forewarned: if you procreate, i MAY knit your baby one of these.


froggy slippers

{07 December 2009}


felting is an amazing, magical process. these slippers started out as large, loosely-knitted bags, and after 20 minutes in a hot washing machine, turned into slippers. still, felting is an inexact science, so it’s hard to gauge just how big the finished item will come out. i started making these for a friend’s newborn, but it became clear that they were never going to felt down to teeny weeny size. so now they have to find a new, toddler-aged recipient.

credit for the pattern goes here; however, while making the froggy slippers, i temporarily placed one felt eye in the center of the slipper. cyclops froggy! thus was born the idea: my own line of monster slippers. they can have teeth, tufts of hair, fins, even a tail or stubby little arms and legs. we dreamed up a website where customers can design and custom-order their own monster slippers. think of it like Mix My Granola, only for wacky slippers.

my kitchen floors are bitterly cold in the morning, and require slippers (not just socks) to stand on them for any length of time. so i think i’ll start with a collection of guest slippers for the house. which size monster are you?

{28 September 2009}


on saturday Chris, Teresa, Geneva and i drove up to Petaluma to go to the Windrush Farms FiberFest — basically an expo of yarn, spinning, dying, felting — all kinds of fiber arts that start with wool. one could follow the yarn-making process from start to finish in a single afternoon — there were alpaca and sheep on the farm, great piles of greasy, newly-shorn wool, tools for carding and cleaning the wool, spinning wheels and drop spindles, dyeing vats and beautiful skeins of yarn for sale, looms for weaving and knitting swatches.

aside from being really much too hot for late september, it was an awfully pleasant, pastoral scene: everyone was so friendly, sitting in the sun watching kids run around the yard and pet the animals, skin tanned and weathered from spending seasons out in the sun and the wind, trading stories and sharing knowledge of something that, now an art form, was for thousands of years, a basic skill. a pair of golden retrievers trotted around the yard loving up to everybody. there was a wood-fired oven in the yard and a guy making hand-made pizzas and lemonade, to be eaten at folding tables and chairs set up in the shade. the farm animals suffered to be petted on the nose (or fed tasty leaves).

the turn of the fall weather (fall arrived on sunday, by the way, the day after our hot trek up to Petaluma), plus the imminent arrival of several friends’ babies, means that i’m inspired to start crafting again. somehow the direct mail gods know this, as i have received three knitting catalogs this week (and, naturally, have earmarked more patterns that i want to knit than i shall ever have time or funds for). but anyway, getting knitting catalogs lets me play the “who would knit this?” game. see, that’s the tricky thing about knitting. finding nice yarns and patterns. because for every beautiful, modern or classic (classy classic, that is, not “christmas sweater” classic) pattern out there, there are a dozen hideously frumpy things to knit out of terrible, cheap plasticky nasty synthetic yarn. it’s almost too easy to play the WWKT game, especially with the patternworks catalog. so for this week, i submit this, to you, dear readers (knitters and wearers of sweaters and non-knitters or sweater-wearers alike): who would knit this?

finished objects

{11 January 2009}

a little more photoblogging, then i’m done. i think (nearly*) all the handmade christmas gifts have been wrapped and shipped and received, so i can finally blog some finished objects here without spoiling anyone’s surprise.


napkin rings i made for my sister-in-law. they are knitted from very thin wire with beads worked into the wire fabric, then sewn into tubes and curled into the doughnut shape. the pattern, Venezia, came from knitty.com.


lace scarf i knitted for my grandmother. this pattern is also from knitty.com. although it’s a relatively easy lace pattern, as lace patterns go, it hasn’t changed my opinion that knitting lace is a hateful, hateful activity. lace is something that i only knit for very special gifts for very special people.


the muffler i knit for my brother’s girlfriend, Carrie. the pattern came from a user named “mintyfresh” on ravelry.com (i think you need an account in order to access it). i loved the idea of a muffler instead of a scarf, something that you can just loosen when you come inside instead of having to unwind, have it drag on the floor, etc. i used my favorite cotton yarn for this, made by Blue Sky. it’s super soft and organically grown.


sweater and hat set for my new niece, Geneva. its about a 9 mo old size, so it’ll be a while till she can wear it. i didn’t love the wiggly texture of the yarn i used, but the color is pleasingly bold. and it’s cotton, which i think is important for baby gifts – no itchy wool on sensitive baby’s skin!


muffler for my roommate, Anne. i cribbed the design from a scarf i saw at anthropologie, and made up the pattern myself. the design is nice, though i’m not happy with the yarn i used (Lion Brand thick n quick wool ease). it was too stiff. the more i knit the more i realize how concerned i am with the drape of the yarn. i think about drape when it comes to fabric, but i realize that knitting is simply the process of creating fabric, and the drape of the finished product depends on the drape of the materials you start with.

next up? i’m making this hat for my mother (she did request a colorful hat!), another belated christmas that i can’t write about here yet, and then maybe finally something for myself. of course, at the rate at which people i know are getting pregnant, i might just have to be a baby hat and bootie-knitting machine for the rest of time.

*well, come on, it wouldn’t be christmas without at least one gift being delivered in february.

sage’s sage slippers

{08 March 2007}

so a few months ago, my friend sage handed me some yarn (coincidentally, sort of sage-colored) left over from a play and dropped the hint, “no one’s ever knitted me anything before…” so over my ski weekend in idaho last month i knit these giant socks and then felted them down to size in the washing machine. felting really is sort of a magic process. ten minutes of agitation in a hot, soapy washing machine and these baggy long socks shrank up into a nice, thick, dense sort of felt slipper.

after felting them i stretched them over a shoe form (having access to all the resources of a costume shop is so handy), and tucked newspaper around it to get the loose, slip-on shape i wanted. the toes came out sort of pointy (i’d recommend altering the pattern so the toes come out rounder next time), so i decided just to go with it and make curled up elf toes. then i left them on a cool air vent to dry overnight and poof! slippers. this is a great, easy project. good for understanding the fundamentals of making a sock, since you’re basically knitting a size 25 sock and then shrinking it down.

i’d make myself a pair if i wasn’t so damn allergic to wool!

pattern was courtesy of knitty.com.

christmas knitting bonanza

{06 January 2007}

ah, now that christmas is over, and gifts are (nearly) all given, i have time to post some pictures of the projects that have been keeping me busy since oh, july. (if knitting bores you to tears, i suggest skipping this post. well, actually, i make no promises about any part of this blog being interesting. it’s all at your own risk). anyway:


christmas slippers

i made these for my new sister-in-law, teresa. it turns out we have the same size feet – a fact we each learned because she was knitting me a very cute pair of striped socks while i was making her slippers.

comment box wants to know:

wow these are great! where’d you get the pattern?

thanks! the pattern is in Handknit Holidays, by Melanie Falick. just know that the pattern seems to produce slippers a size or two smaller than it indicates, even after checking gauge – these are the largest size, modeled on my own size 8.5(US) feet, and i had to block* the heck out of them to get them to fit. if i made them over i’d adjust the pattern to make them bigger. also, it’s kind of weird the way the toes can be seen through the eyelet at the toe, and i think if they weren’t so stretched it would sit higher on the foot.

I used the actual yarn that the pattern called for (Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4 Ply), but it’s been discontinued, so it’s getting hard to find.

*blocking them was funny, because the only way i could think of to do it was to put the wet slipper on over a sock on my own foot, safety pin it to the sock in the right shape, then put another sock over that to keep the slipper clean, and wear it around until it dried, spending much of the evening dangling my feet off the end of the couch near the radiator. mmm…wet wool feet.


fibonacci’s handbag

this is an original (altho the flower came from a pattern by NONI). the width of the stripes correspond to the fibonacci sequence (altho not in order, obviously). it’s fully lined, so that putting a few heavy objects into the bag shouldn’t stretch it out of shape.

although it wasn’t until a few years ago that it really clicked, it was my grandmother who first taught me to knit when i was about 8. so when i decided to knit something for her for christmas, i asked my grandfather to do a bit of reconnaissance work on my behalf. he came back with the following:

“If you are knitting Christmas gifts, Grandma Jean would love a tote bag, first choice would be black with accent or trim of raspberry or coral. Second choice would be Navy Blue. It should be big enough to accommodate an eight inch long wallet.”

screw the surprise factor, i love it when people make specific requests. then i can give them exactly what they want.


aran christmas stockings

my brother matt requested christmas stockings for him and his girlfriend, carrie. here’s the first of the pair.

i busted my ass (well, fingertips) to get these done in time for christmas, and on the 21st of december fedex’ed them to denver…just in time for the blizzard. it took more than two weeks for them to actually be delivered. oh well, they have them for next christmas.

the pattern came from Handknit Holidays. i used a double strand of Cascade Ecological Wool on size 11 needles. they came out pretty big – i warned matt he was going to have to buy carrie a lot of presents.


make-believe crowns and christmas mice

two more things: the soft stretchy headband-style crowns i knit for my neighbor’s daughters (so cute! the kids that is, not the headbands. they’re just okay). the crowns were my first excuse to knit with novelty yarn, which i generally eschew in favor of natural fibers and earth tones. but hey, knitting for kids sometimes calls for heroic sacrifices.

also, christmas mice, because so many of my friends, like me, are at an age where we have invested our maternal instincts in owning cats. hell, i address christmas cards to: friend & cat. that is, when i send christmas cards. this year i was feeling particularly misanthropic around the first week of december. i do love you all, it’s that the past few months have been difficult. anyway, if you have a kitty, there’s probably a christmas mouse with your cat’s name on it. one of these days i’ll get off work before midnight and make it to the post office…

feb 06 – No. 1: Knit myself a fair isle sweater

{07 May 2006}

i’ve been meaning to post this task as complete for a couple of months now, but it took a while to get a picture (of sorts). why isn’t my head in the picture, you ask? well, you know how photographs can reveal ghostly images that can’t be seen in real life? just like the spirits that seemingly dwell around us, visible only to the camera’s eye, i have a secret double chin that can only be detected on film. you can’t see it in real life, but oh, the cameras never lie. so no pictures of my head today. look at the sweater, anyway. it’s my first sweater and i’m pretty proud of it in spite of a few lumps and bumps. the mohair-wool blend is super itchy to my hyper-sensitive skin tho, so wearing it evokes a confusing blend of pride and itchiness. i may end up giving it away. only, i extended the sleeves to accommodate my gorilla-length arms, so the recipient would probably have to alter the sleeves again to make it human-shaped.

some other knitting projects recently finished:

mom’s birthday scarf:

everyone say “oooh, cables!”

baby hat for my friend diane’s baby (due any moment):

and matching booties:

woolly hat for myself:

the hat is, admittedly, a little out of season. i designed it in march, when the weather was still stormy, but mom’s birthday scarf took so long that both it and the hat were completed after the weather had turned for good.