I’ve spent the past five days under the thumb of an ugly cold, not much good for anything but lolling on the couch with my box of Kleenex and countless mugs of tea. I’ve read about 140 pages of Wuthering Heights, watched the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for the umpteenth time, and I’ve finished sewing the binding for the baby quilt I started last summer. See?

This is the slapdash log cabin I named Satsuki (for the girl in “My Neighbor Totoro”). I finished the top months ago, then realized that the eight-point stars I wanted to machine quilt over each block were going to cause a problem.

If you don’t quilt from the center of the whole quilt, you tend to get bunchiness somewhere. For me, that was going to be in the sashing between blocks. I was too wedded to my eight-point stars to change my mind, and not feeling fastidious enough to make the quilting process much more complex by sewing the parts of the six stars on the interior of the quilt first. I wanted to just sew one whole star at a time, block by block, so that’s what I did. Like the rest of the quilt, the stars are intentionally free form. I made no attempt to align the points from block to block, and I let them be lopsided because the bright center squares aren’t really in the center of each block.

Sure enough, the bunchy sashing happened exactly as predicted. So I created a fix and pretended it was a design element.

Yep, I used red embroidery thread to whipstitch up the center of the sashing, gathering and securing the excess fabric in a pleat.

If you want to make a quilt like this yourself, you’ll need a yard of fabric for the back (I had enough excess in my yard to also make the small squares that link the sashing strips from the backing fabric), a yard of flannel for the batting, five fat quarters in neutral fabrics (mine looked very quiet in their bundle but livened up considerably once I was sewing them) for the log cabin blocks and the outer border (this was exactly enough; I had hardly any fabric left over), about a third of a yard of neutral sashing fabric, and small amounts of leftover brights for the block centers and binding. Start with a 2″ square of your bright fabric, then start snipping scraps of the neutrals at random to fit around it. I cut every piece with scissors as I was ready to attach it, and I let the strips be variable widths so the whole thing would be rustic and cattywampus. Don’t measure anything, but keep working around and around until it looks like you’ve got a square about a foot wide. When you’ve made six blocks, square them all up to 12″. Cut seventeen 2″ x 12″ strips for the sashing and twelve 2″ squares for the small squares linking the sashing strips. Assemble them around the six blocks and sew all together. Then cut the remaining neutral fabrics into 4″ strips of variable lengths and piece them together in lengths sufficient to log cabin them around the quilt to form the outer border. Make the quilt sandwich with the backing and the flannel, then draw eight-point stars (as you’d see in a compass rose) radiating from the center of each block to its edge and corners (don’t quilt into the sashing). Machine quilt around the center square and along the lines for the star you’ve drawn. You’ll need two hanks of embroidery thread to whipstitch the pleats; just pinch up the center of the loose fabric in the sashing and whipstitch from the center of one of the small sashing-linking squares (these must have a name, right?) to the next. Let the center of that little square stay loose and poofy. Repeat in all seventeen of the sashing strips. Cut 2″ strips of variable lengths from your scraps of brights for the binding and attach it in the usual way. (I like the directions in Bend-the-Rules Sewing for the Lap Quilt for bindings.) Et voila! A cute baby or lap quilt that makes you feel terribly creative and folk artsy and doesn’t task your patience for fussiness or accuracy. It’s liberating, I promise you.

Good for one Knitting Olympics finisher’s medal:

About this lever knitting business: several of you asked why I’d want to learn a whole different way of knitting, and it’s a good question. I am the kind of person who wants to know about this kind of thing just because it exists and because it’s so significant to the history of the craft (knitters who had to work fast enough to earn a living at it knit this way; our more familiar throwing and picking styles emerged from a desire to make the process of knitting look more ladylike).  I can’t yet lever knit effectively enough to make it faster than my usual throwing. But it does, in the mean time, let me use my hands and wrists in a different way, and as I now know from my class with Carson Demers, that’s a good thing. My work is all about using the computer, and between that and my knitting habit I’ll need to be careful if I want to avoid repetitive stress injuries. I was almost the only person in Carson’s class at Madrona who didn’t already have problems in the wrists, elbows, or shoulders, and I want to be able to knit in comfort until I’m dead. So changing up the positions in which I knit is a really good idea.

So back to this little practice sweater. I had the one lovely skein of Toots LeBlanc Jacob/Alpaca DK, but I knew it wouldn’t stretch to a whole sweater. I had some Rowan Felted Tweed in the stash that was about the same weight, so I figured I’d add a hem in colorwork. I thought I remembered Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mittens having some nice large botanical motifs, and sure enough I opened the book right to the page with the chart for Graph #53: District Unknown. And I only needed to increase three stitches to fit in three repetitions of the motif.

I only worked half the chart because I didn’t think a long cardigan would be very practical on a three-month-old, but I quite like the sort of wallpaper effect that results.

There was still the problematic neckline to deal with, though. I tried tacking it down a couple of different ways, but I just wasn’t satisfied. A hood seemed like the best solution, so I quickly knit one up in the Felted Tweed. And since I’d already given up on this little cardigan being unisex, I thought I’d use the last yard of the Toots LeBlanc for a little embroidery to match the buttons.

Ta-da! Another little sweater banked against the onslaught of 2010 babies. I really want a whole grown-up sweater’s worth of the Jacob/alpaca. So tweedy. So full of character. Love it.

No pictures yet because it really needs a blocking, but the little lever-knit sweater I’m calling Baltic Rose is all finished! Although I still had about six short rows to go when they extinguished the Olympic torch, I was finished and able to give the closing ceremonies my full attention by the time they rolled out the giant inflatable beavers in the finale (which was like a Bollywood musical number with lumberjacks), so I’m awarding myself a lever-knitting medal. And really, if I hadn’t decided at 3pm that what my little sweater really needed was a hood, I could have been done by the time the gold medal hockey game was over.

(I’m one American, by the way, who thinks that game came out exactly as it should have. I cheered when the U.S. tied it up in the last half-second of regulation, but I was glad Canada’s young star could earn his country the win in the end. Both teams played hard and well, it was dramatically close, it went to overtime but not to the somewhat hollow victory of penalty shots, and in the end the gold went to the country that really showed the passion to deserve it. If the Americans had won, we’d all have patted ourselves on the back, and some of our youngest hockey players would have remembered it for years, but there wouldn’t have been nationwide street parties, you know what I mean?)

Pictures soon and full details soon, I promise.

It doesn’t look like much, does it? (Although I’ll tell you I don’t know what possessed me when I thought this design really needed a bit of stranded colorwork… knit flat. Purl-side stranding? Way arduous. I’m sure I swore never to do it again a few years back.) But every stitch of it is lever knit. It has a sleeve now, too, which I lever knit on two circulars. Whether it will fit an actual baby remains to be seen; the math for the yoke just didn’t want to play nice and even after four rounds of increasing by a third I wasn’t convinced I had enough stitches for a body and two sleeves. I ended up casting on 20 to rejoin at each underarm and then increasing six more beneath for extra body fullness. But I think I can finish it before the closing ceremonies, and while it doesn’t feel like my most amazing accomplishment, it’s been something entirely new for me in terms of technique. I’m choosing to equate it with competing in curling rather than in the cross country marathon or aerials — it’s about precision and focus rather than unbelievable strength and stamina or derring-do bordering on insanity. At least it’s no more underwhelming than snowboard cross.

Oh, and the little stripey sweater? It’s going to be called Okoboji, thanks to Mia having reminded me of our dear sailing roommate, Kate, and her charming Iowa hometown and its lake. I’ve almost finished writing up the pattern notes to send to those of you who volunteered to test knit. Thanks, guys!