I finally brought about the trifecta of Mr. Garter’s Christmas slippers, Mr. Garter’s feet, and the camera in a decent pool of light. These are the Saturday Morning Slippers from Kristin Spurkland’s The Knitting Man(ual), and I’m proud to say that Mr. G has been wearing them regularly since the 25th of December. The yarn is Steadfast Fibers Wonderful Wool in driftwood and groovy green above, and the Wonderful Wool driftwood carried with Green Mountain Spinnery mystery wool on the sole. The Wonderful Wool is basically Lamb’s Pride’s plant-dyed cousin from a little company in Idaho – it’s an Aran-weight wool blended with 15% mohair, and it makes excellent mittens and slippers and wears like iron. I don’t even like to think about how long it’s been in the stash, but now it’s keeping my husband’s feet nice and toasty.

This project was more of a wrassle than a knit: two strands of worsted on size 8 needles in a twisted garter stitch is enough to make your hands beg for mercy. But I fought through them, and since I wasn’t sure there was anywhere in the house I could dry a dense woolen garment in two days without the recipient finding it, I got a little creative with a toolbox and the dehumidifier in the stock room at Knit/Purl. I’m here to tell you there’s no faster way to dry your handknits than to suspend them over the dehumidifier from the handles of two hammers balanced on the fuse box. They were bone dry the next morning and ready for wrapping. It’s nice to have an option for sturdy slippers that doesn’t involve felting. And Mr. G’s pleasure in wearing them means the pain was worthwhile.

While I may be devoted to my husband, my pal Patrick recently accused me of having knitterly commitment issues. Fair enough: from where I sit I can spy the basket containing my Gee’s Bend Log Cabin blanket, my Lily-of-the-Valley corset, my Lotus Blossom shawl, and my Frost Flowers sweater. It’s been at least six months since I’ve touched a single one of them. In the mean time, I’ve cast on roughly nineteen new projects (thanks, Ravelry!). Fourteen of those are finished, five are on the needles, and I’ve flirted (meaning I swatched, which doesn’t count as casting on – it’s like first base) with two more. Mr. G will kindly cover his eyes while I tell you I sassed Patrick that commitment is for poor souls who don’t have a different tasty morsel for every night of the week.

Seriously, do you believe in monogamous relations with your knitting projects? I clearly don’t, but I think the record will show that I finish the ones I start more often than not. I crave variety is all. Last weekend I realized I wasn’t actively working on anything with a needle larger than a US #2. There’s the Trøndelag mitten on #0s, an 80-stitch sock on #0s that I can’t show you yet, and the Ivy lace stole on #2s. A hankering to knit something instantly gratifying drove me to the stash after the bulky cinnabar Perendale wool, and in two days’ time I had a cardigan up to the armpits and a sleeve ready to join it. I busted out another half a sleeve this afternoon. If I don’t run out of wool, this will be my fastest sweater ever. I’m not a big-needle gal, but the #10.5 whoppers surely do crack along! Patrick will be lucky if I don’t call it the Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am cardigan.

But just to prove that I haven’t dropped the torch, I give you Ivy stole progress:

That’s about a third of its total length, not counting the edging I get to pick up and knit with a 47″ #0. Two chart repetitions per week should leave me the whole month of April to gnash my teeth over the edging and half of May to block it with seventeen porcupines’ worth of pins. Don’t begrudge me my other liaisons will I can still get them.

Christmas in Tallinn stocking from Knitting on the Road

Hifa 2 in Currant, Ballet Pink, and Spinach

US #3 needles

A stocking for my beautiful sister-to-be. She’s more of a pink girl, so I pushed the color spectrum toward the girly side. But optical illusion is a beautiful thing – it came out looking red and white just the same! I loved the pattern, especially those little horizontal braids. I added an extra repetition of the colorwork chart for a more generous length. And I made room in the “cuff” for her name, because I like names on stockings:

Yep, I made a little goof in the R and messed up my tension trying to fix it. But overall this project went pretty quickly, and it whetted my appetite for more stranded colorwork (witness the mittens, plus another project I’ll talk about later). If I knit another of these — and given that my beloved husband ended up getting his presents in my leopard-print rubber galosh because we couldn’t find his stocking, it seems there’s need — I’ll use Hifa 3 instead. The two-ply was a little light and a little inconsistent in… I think spinners call it grist? I love me some traditional Norwegian wool, though, and the colors of the Hifa are rich and delicious. As much as I appreciate the many gorgeous luxury fibers available to knitters these days (have you looked at the ridiculous bounty of mouth-watering options available from Fleece Artist/Handmaiden alone?), I think I’d be happy to knit nothing but old-school wool for the rest of my days. What a shame that I’m forced to spend so much of my time with laceweight cashmere these days! Shed a little tear for me, friends. I vow to take a picture of the ivy lace stole this weekend.

On a whim, we went to the coast yesterday. Mr. G’s parents have a little beach house south of Lincoln City, an unassuming and somewhat mildewy little pre-fab that shudders when the washer goes on spin cycle and will someday be demolished and replaced with a sturdy and charming cottage, but a beach house nonetheless, nicely nestled on an estuary teeming with grebes, buffleheads, herons, and gulls of every stripe. Mr. G was feeling knocked about after a presentation he felt he flubbed, and I had two days off in trade for working this weekend, so we packed up the dog and a change of underwear and off we went. We got a late start, but there was light enough when we arrived to cross the footbridge and tramp over the dune to see the wild waves.

Our tough Texas pup found the ocean quite alarmingly vast, noisy, and wet. She treated us to an operatic account of her concerns, with brief intermissions to chase irresistible shreds of blowing foam. Not even a cuddle could convince her we weren’t all in mortal peril.

(Look how big she’s grown!) Once the sea was out of sight, she was her happy inquisitive self again, and we had a quiet evening of knitting, working, and snoozing by a smoky fire that snorted at Mr. G’s boyscout smarts and required near constant stoking. I’ve been knitting this mitten:

I had a hankering for some colorwork, so last Sunday I decided to cast on and reverse-engineer this mitten from a picture in this fabulous coffee-table book of Norwegian mittens that was floating around at the yarn shop last year. The book was – you guessed it – written entirely in Norwegian, which I cannot read. Not a problem, as the book is plum stuffed with thorough charts. But as luck would have it, I fell for the design on a pair for which there was no pattern. Here’s what I know about them: “Mannsvott fra Sør-Trøndelag, Trøndelag Folkemuseum, Sverresborg FTT 28549. Vottene er strikket av Bjørg Sliper fra Trondheim, til hennes svigerfar i 1946.” I’m guessing that means they’re men’s mittens from a place called Trøndelag (which I have no idea how to pronounce), and maybe the knitter was named Bjørg Sliper, and they were either knit or donated to the Folkemuseum in 1946. Maybe some of you readers can help me out here? Anyway, I was drawn to the beautiful sprigs of berries on the cuff, and to the semi-botanical design on the back of the mitten. (Terri Shea refers to those windmills of foliage as pine boughs in her excellent Selbuvotter; I don’t recognize the other elements, but I haven’t read the book cover-to-cover yet. The next pair of (equally beautiful) mittens on the page in the Norwegian book is from Selbu and uses the same berry sprigs.) And wait until you see the thumbs!

Yes, that’s a jar of Swedish cloudberry preserves modeling my mitten cuff – a cuff which was influenced by the advice of a certain Estonian, I might add – and the colors are non-traditional, and the yarn is woolen-spun Shetland, not a proper worsted Norwegian wool. This is not a strict recreation of an authentic mitten. A girl just needs a good pair of overmitts to wear to the dog park and a chance to indulge her mitten fetish, you know? But this girl also likes nerdy knitting history, so if you know anything about these patterns I’d love to hear it!

With the twelfth day of Christmas officially drawing the holidays to a close, what say we blog a few more gifts?

Back in November I got a lovely letter from a dear friend in New York. She reads here and I don’t want to embarrass her, but she’s been one of the chief mentors of my life and a true kindred spirit. The sort of person you name a child for. No children other than the four-leggedies in the offing here, so I thought I’d better knit her something in the mean time. She mentioned wanting to knit “a really wow-y scarf” and asked for a pattern recommendation. So I knit her a wow-y scarf so she’d have something to warm her neck against the vicious Upper West Side winds, and sent her a copy of the book it came from. I present Drifting Pleats, from Lynne Barr’s clever Knitting New Scarves:

This is The Fibre Company’s Terra in the color Sorrel. Three skeins is exactly the right amount for this pattern – there were only a couple of yards left at the end. I can’t praise this yarn enough. It feels wonderful in the hank, but it’s even better when you’re knitting with it. It’s plump and lustrous with silk, but soft with baby alpaca and conversational with merino. Do you know what I mean? Some yarns feel so interactive, as if they’re having an invigorating discussion with your fingers. Anyway, I couldn’t get enough. And this pattern is such a kick that I found an excuse to drift some more pleats right away.

This color is Redwood. I blame these three skeins for pushing me into my love affair with the cinnabar color that left me helpless to resist that bulky wool I showed you last post. This scarf is now finished — bound off last night and just awaiting some end-weaving and a couple of blasts of steam — and almost ready to leave for its new home. This one is a commission from a friend who wanted a unique, handmade gift for his lady love. I’m a sucker for sentiment like that (and I may have a certain weakness for kind-hearted and extremely handsome men who can bunny-hop the cyclocross barriers), so I told him he could reimburse me for the yarn and we’d call it good. After all, knitting with this yarn is its own reward.

Know what? The year is only six days old, and already I’m seeing a trend emerge. 2008 is going to be about the appreciation of special yarns. 2007 was, in many ways, about patterns — mostly the designing of them. But most of those efforts began with the idea for the garment, and I co-opted whatever yarn seemed like it might suit. But my new projects are beginning with the desire to transform a beautiful yarn into its ideal knitted shape. It’s a subtle difference, but a whole new challenge. There will still be plenty of design happening at Blue Garter. I should be able to show you my Shibui sweater and socks very soon, and I’ve got a new pair of socks on the needles for them for this autumn. And one of these days I’ll properly blog the dainty little Jo Sharp Aran Tweed sweater-in-progress I’m calling Victoria, the pattern for which will be available here eventually. My sketchbook is fat with more ideas. But I’m going to try this year to give some of the special yarns in my stash the attention they deserve. And that, my friends, is as close to a New Year’s resolution as I intend to come.