Thank you all so much for your warm welcome to Ada! I imagine one day she’ll see the archives of this blog and be amazed that she had so many well-wishers all over the globe. I hope it makes her feel all cozy and grateful inside the way it does me.

Sometime soon I’ll manage a post about my own knitting — really! I took all these photos of finished goods before Ada arrived! — but today the temperature finally dropped back into the 60s and 70s and our girl got to wear her very first handknit, made by the lovely and brilliant Kristen Hanley Cardozo. (No, that cute little stripey number she’s wearing in her debut post wasn’t made by hand, though it’s nonetheless a very sweet gift from friends.) Kristen designed this adorable cardigan especially for our Minnow. It’s called Surtsey and you can get it here.

She also somehow got another baby to hold still long enough to take pictures of it for the pattern. Now I know why those famous photographers who arrange babies in fruit baskets and giant pea pods and whatnot only work with sleeping infants. Herewith my laughable attempt at a Surtsey photoshoot:

Okay, not too bad. You can see the sweater pretty well. But then it goes downhill…

This is the girl the pediatrician just called one of the mellowest babies he’s ever seen.

Boy, does she have him fooled.

Mille grazie, Kristen. We love it!

Hello, world! I am Ada!

I decided to come in July instead of in August — surprise!

I am very healthy and so is my mama.

I’ve been a devotee of Elizabeth Zimmermann since the day I discovered her work. Given that I didn’t learn to knit until after her death, I’ve got nothing on the hordes of knitters who have revered her for half a century. In fact, it was just about exactly four years ago that I ran across a dog-eared copy of The Knitter’s Almanac at Powell’s and shortly thereafter launched Zimmermania and began Mr. G’s Fishtrap Aran, which is still one of my most prized accomplishments.  But the first of Elizabeth’s designs that I completed was the Baby Surprise Jacket. I made one for Misa & Morgan’s son that same autumn, and about two years later I made another for their daughter. Both these little jackets have been lovingly passed on to other friends with babies, which delights me and assures me that this design is a true classic destined to be appreciated for as long as we have  wool and sticks to knit it with and babies to bundle into it. So I could hardly let my own spawn weather its first year unSurprised.

Orange and blue are kind of a thing for us — Mr. G injected his own aesthetic sense into our wedding by selecting a bright orange tie and socks, and at the time I wasn’t so sure about his choice. Orange seemed weirdly autumnal for a June wedding and didn’t exactly provide any continuity with the blue bridesmaids’ dresses or the ocean backdrop. But I ended up using the tie to bustle my wedding dress so we could have a proper dance, and I’ve been fond of orange and blue together ever since. (And if my grandchild ever decides to make a quilt out of the hopelessly dated but sentimentally valuable clothes we’ve left behind, I hope that orange tie will be in it.)

This orange and this blue are Miss Babs’s Cumberland Sport, hand-dyed on an 80% wool and 20% cotton base from Green Mountain Spinnery. Miss Babs has discontinued the yarn and the remainder of her stock is on sale, which is where that link will take you!* This is good stuff, rustic and tweedy and sturdy and minimally processed, and Miss Babs’s dye process complements the yarn beautifully. I had Sky and French Marigold, one skein of each. I ran out of the Sky just a few garter ridges shy of where I’d hoped to stretch it, but oh well.

Every time I do a BSJ I try something a little different with the details. Here I opted for a centered decrease that I slipped on the wrong side to create that architectural miter, and I continued the effect by (wrong-side) slipping the stitch between the paired increases on the body portion, too. I wanted i-cord edging in the orange, and remembered having learned from Joyce Williams (at Schoolhouse’s Knitting Camp two years ago) a way of concealing the blips of blue base color that you get from doing an applied i-cord edge in the standard way. But I couldn’t remember just what that was, and I was down at the coast**  and hadn’t brought my notebook. So I used technology. I borrowed my husband’s iPhone to email a cry for help to Jen, which I figured was the best possible move. Not only does Jen epitomize the kind of thorough, curious, experimental-yet-steeped-in-tradition, and encyclopedia-brained knitter that you want to know when you’ve got burning questions about technique, but she was actually AT Knitting Camp in the PRESENCE of Joyce Williams at that very moment. (And yes, I was wild with envy.) Jen sent back these instructions:

From Joyce herself:
(co 2 & slide to right of garment sts)
*K2, sl1, yo, k1, psso [return 3 to left needle]*

It’s the yo that makes it blip less
Hope you’re having a good weekend! Joyce says to tell you hello!
j

Sent from my iPad

(I think I may need one of these iPads at some point.) After a couple of false starts for which I blame third trimester pregnancy brain, I got my i-cord going. But I was still seeing just a wee bit of blue through the orange. So I unvented this variation, which looks a bit like it’s been partially crocheted and therefore isn’t quite as natty as regular i-cord to this knitter’s eye, but totally hides the base color:

CO 2 and slide to the right of the live garment sts. *K2, yo, sl1, k1, pass over yo and slipped st, return 3 sts to left needle and rep from *.

Try it or stick with Joyce’s way — as Elizabeth would say, “Knitter’s choice!”

I also mucked about with a reinforcement of the traditional yo-k2tog buttonhole, as I’m always bothered by that untidy strand of yarn that occurs on the following row and can later confuse you about which hole you actually want to poke the button through. Here’s what I came up with:

On the return (WS) row, k tog the stitch preceding the buttonhole with the front leg of the yo, but don’t slip the yo off the needle. Bring the yarn forward and over the needle to trace the path of the yo yarn, then carry on knitting as usual. On the next (RS) row, k tog the two yo strands as one st. (Note that this is for garter stitch; if working in stockinet you’d purl rather than knitting on the WS row.)

It seems to create a firmer buttonhole, which can be good if your buttons aren’t large enough to be a nice tight squeeze through the regular kind of hole. Anyway, I like it when knitters share their dabblings, so I thought I’d put some of mine up here.

But enough knitterly minutia. I love this little jacket and I can’t wait to wrestle my baby’s pudgy little arms into its stripey sleeves.

*I’ve been there ahead of you and stocked up on Pewter and Light Turquoise. Because Minnow’s going to need a Tomten for the winter after this one.

**More on this little getaway next time. Mr. G took some fine pictures in Ecola State Park. You couldn’t have convinced me beforehand that even gentle hiking’s fairly grueling for the nearly-nine-months-pregnant body, but it was well worth being sore and tired and having extra contractions the next day.

Dear Mrs. Smith of Rome,

I suspect you are long dead and will not receive this letter, but last weekend I found my grandmother’s book of dessert recipes. I was hoping to find some notes about the summer pudding she used to make with blueberries and bread, but there were none. Faced with a nearly empty ice box and a need to produce a comestible contribution for our monthly book club tonight, I leafed through the handwritten or typewritten or clipped-and-glued pages of sweets. Your “Dropped Molasses Cookies” were faintly dubious in title, but I had nearly all the  ingredients in the pantry.

I did not have “cold lard or drippings,” but your recommendation of them has caused me to reconsider the flavors cookies may have had in the past. As far as I am able to recollect without searching the family genealogies, my relations last resided in Rome, NY in the era of my great-grandparents. It had never occurred to me that their experience of a molasses cookie might have included “drippings.” Anyway, I am a vegetarian, so I hope butter was an acceptable substitute.

I also wasn’t sure what sort of molasses you had in mind. Would the default molasses have been blackstrap or sweetened seventy years ago (or more)? At any rate, I only had blackstrap and there wasn’t a full cup left in the bottle, so I topped it off with some Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I’m not sure if this would have been familiar to you or not, but my half-English grandmother certainly knew about it, so I felt I was still proceeding in the right spirit.

At this point I made perhaps my most controversial innovation. I didn’t have any ground cloves; in fact, I remember trying to buy them recently and their being either unavailable or absurdly expensive. So I used garam masala instead. I believe you won’t have heard of garam masala, as I don’t think Indian cookery had yet attained much popularity in the Northeast United States when you were living there. It is a blend of various peppers and spices, including cloves, and upon sniffing the bottle I was able to imagine it lending a piquant note to the cookies. In it went, although I didn’t dare add quite so much as the half teaspoon you had stipulated for the cloves.

I appreciated your instruction about the more-or-less 3 1/4 cups of flour. “Use your judgement” is positively Zimmermannesque. I think this time I may have judged on the side of a little too much flour, but I will remember this and make adjustments at next baking.

You left me entirely in the dark as to the optimal temperature and time for baking, my good woman. So I have guessed at 375 degrees and eleven minutes. I hope the cookies will come out well. I have licked the spatula and the batter certainly holds promise.

Yours sincerely,

Mary Theresa Soper’s great-granddaughter Sarah

Update: The cookies were pretty good! They’d be even better with chunks of crystallized ginger. I think molasses was probably sweetened back in the day, because these were not very sweet — I actually rolled the second batch in brown sugar before dropping them onto the cookie sheet. And ten minutes is enough baking time.