Looking back at my notes, I see that I cast on for this jacket a scant twelve days before Ada was born. I did most of the knitting in the early months of her life, and if you’ve experienced the early months of someone else’s life first hand and full time, you’ll know that means I made a lot of mistakes. I can see some of them right on the front. This isn’t a simple pattern, despite being entirely garter or stockinet stitch, and it isn’t constructed like any sweater you’ve ever made. The instructions run to ten pages, and you’d better be willing to try your hand at short rows and provisional cast-ons and small needles if you want to attempt it. But if you’re a patient, thinking knitter, it’s rewarding. I mean, the cuteness!

It’s got clever shaping, too… look how the back of the coat is extra roomy to swing freely over that big cloth-diapered bum.

The back details alone were enough to suck me in. I love the way the design shows off yarns with long color changes (I chose Noro Kureyon Sock for Minni I and have already started Minni II with Crystal Palace’s Mini Mochi), although there are some darling solid versions out there, too. A word on the sizing: Ada is fifteen months old and is a medium-size baby — currently right at the 50th percentile for height. She’s wearing the 6-9-month size jacket, and as you can see she’s got plenty of room to grow into it some more. The designer, Lene Alve, does live in the Arctic Circle, and I suppose by the time I got a six-month-old into enough layers to stay cozy in that climate, she might just about fill up this jacket! But for the rest of us, I’d say multiply the suggested ages in the pattern by 2. It’s a good thing this jacket runs so large, though, even if you wind up having to tuck it away for a year. A pre-mobile baby couldn’t really do it justice, and a crawler would always be running aground on the fronts. (Ada still catches the fronts with her knees sometimes when she’s going up stairs.) You need a toddler to set that sweet hemline swaying, trust me.

]]> http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/11/minnow-en-minni/feed/ 30 http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/10/hands-are-to-hold/ http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/10/hands-are-to-hold/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:23:59 +0000 Sarah http://www.bluegarter.org/?p=1939 So wrote Ruth Krauss in her delightful book of definitions, A Hole Is to Dig, which you should read whether you are a child or live with one or not.

My hands are writing a grant and publishing a curricular journal. They are knitting gifts for friends who read here. They are performing liposuction and a double amputation/reconstruction on a sweater, which I really feel ought to qualify me for some kind of knitting doctorate if the patient lives.

But for most of most days, they are the only pair of hands that will do for holding all 48 crayons until they can be carefully replaced in the box (some of them upside down); the best pair to hold for companionship or to steady against when eagerness outpaces feet; the pair that can do “Itsy Bitsy Spider” again; the pair that can slice cheddar (”tseeeeeese!”) into manageable pieces; the pair that can lift and stroke and comfort after a tumble.

I’m going to be out of a job before I know it. My girl can already fetch her own boots when she wants to go outside; climb the steps of the tallest slide at the park (with Mama’s hands at the ready just behind, of course); put Papa’s socks back in the drawer upon request (Papa himself could learn a thing or two!); carry a dirty bowl to the dishwasher; pat the animals gently; play the “niano;” and pour bath water into a funnel to turn a paddle wheel. One short year ago we were here:

This photo is blurry because she detested tummy time. (In fact, it may be the only one I ever took… it seemed heartless to point a camera at one’s offspring sobbing into the rug because she couldn’t lift her gigantic noggin.) This is better:

Not to be too nostalgic for this sleepy wee person who exists only in memory; I’m really quite thrilled to see her growing and learning and experimenting. I love discovering who she is a little more each day, and likewise sharing with her more of who I am. (We dropped the car off at the mechanic this morning and walked home in the rain, Ada in the front carrier and the two of us wrapped in Mr. G’s big red raincoat. It was a slow walk because Ada wanted to touch the dripping leaves of every shrub and overhanging tree while I told her the species. I figure if a child can discriminate between polygons by the time she goes to kindergarten, she ought also to be able to tell a maple from a birch and a redwood from a cedar.)

But I did suffer a pang for the fleetingness of babyhood when she fell asleep in my arms this evening, which she so rarely does anymore. I have to remind myself, as I read Barnyard Dance for what feels like the forty-seventh time since lunch, that this is the most important work I can do. That “hands are to hold” is perhaps more obvious than that “rugs are so dogs have napkins,” but no less true and sometimes, when patience is fraying, not much easier to remember. I am keeping my hands ready for holding as often as I can.

… and maybe even pick a ripe one next time…

(Mama needs to practice with this nifty new lens a whole lot. And find shooting locations with more light.)

I think it’s a toss-up which of us had the more wonderful, challenging, mind-expanding year. Like all fresh parents, I can only marvel at the metamorphosis that turns a dozy, squeaky, half-cooked scrap of newborn into a sturdy, busy, willful toddler who comes home from nursery school with marker on her face and glitter in her hair in twelve short months.

(Like the dress? It’s another vintage keepsake that once belonged to our most excellent neighbor Barb!)

Here’s to making the most of every day until we’re 35, my little love.

How about a simple pair of fingerless gloves inspired by cycling wear, with just a few classy details? I’m calling these the Vilaine Gloves in honor of the river the peloton will cross on their way into the finish town of Redon tomorrow. I knit them using far less than one skein of The Fibre Company’s Savannah DK, a summery blend of wool, cotton, linen and soy, but the pattern is written with length and percentage measurements so that you can use a yarn of any weight from your stash.

If you’d like to have at it, the pattern is here: VilaineGloves

More pictures? Glad to oblige.

I used one of my favorite thumb gussets, placing the increases only on the palm side. This treatment is most useful if there’s patterning on the back of the hand you don’t want to disturb, but I like the way it looks in general.

Final point of polish: a professorial leather button to close the wrist band. One needn’t, of course, wear these gloves for actual cycling, so you can choose as dressy a button as you wish.

As always, please contact me right away if you find errors or tricky bits in this pattern. Full disclosure: I knit and wrote this sucker in the space of two days. During the first, the yahoos up the hill who can’t wait until 4 July to light their illegal fireworks panicked my poor dog, who jumped or squeezed under the fence and went on the lam for a night and a day, causing anxiety and heartbreak in all quarters. (Thanks to all that is good in the universe, she was not run over on Sandy Boulevard and kind souls Jean and Tim coaxed her into their home and reported her so I could retrieve her the next afternoon. She is terribly footsore but safely home.) Then last night the baby decided to conduct a one-girl circus in our bed for several hours. All this is by way of saying there are probably errors, so knit with sense and trust your judgment, mes amis.

from a little series we took as a birthday gift to my mother

If I were a photographer, I would do a whole study of children with books. During my senior year, my college hosted a show of Abelardo Morell’s photographs of books. I was ensorcelled. I’ve appreciated books all my life, first as vessels of story, later also as objects with their own beauty, but under Morell’s lens they become landscapes, new worlds taking physical as well as figurative form. (Appropriately, he illustrated Alice in Wonderland in 1998.)

I’ve been thinking about the beauty of the form magnifying the beauty of the content since I visited the Lloyd Reynolds retrospective exhibit at Reed College last week. (Alas, it has closed, so you can’t go see it now.) I had the chance to go with our fourth and fifth graders, who have been studying the arc of human achievement across the millennia, from the ancient constructions through the Renaissance, and have learned both calligraphy and typesetting. Lloyd Reynolds was internationally known as a great calligrapher and teacher of calligraphy; he also designed books and carved woodblocks and Punch and Judy puppets. He influenced pretty much everyone practicing calligraphy in the Northwest today and can even be credited with the existence of decent type faces for the computer, thanks to his sway over students like Steve Jobs (who dropped in on Lloyd’s classes after he dropped out of Reed) and Sumner Stone. The kids and their teachers and I admired scores of his hand-lettered signs, weathergrams, favorite verses and quotations, and diagrams of pleasing page formats and relationships between letters. Later we got to try our own hands at some calligraphy, and I was struck by Lloyd’s advice to his students:

The Order of the Black Chrysanthemum was his tongue-in-cheek name for the brotherhood of calligraphers, who could always be identified by the generous ink blots on their shirts, should they absent-mindedly place their pens in their breast pockets. And he wanted aspiring calligraphers always to use large pens so that their mistakes would be loud, proud, and easy to spy. Then they could do better the next time. I love this. It’s entirely counter to my own penchant for fastidious workmanship, but too often those efforts wind up crabbed and I never get the flow. My pen was not nearly large enough for my mistakes on this day, as you can see from my unlovely samples here, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself and have been seized by a desire to take a calligraphy class and to read the work of Edward Johnston, which Lloyd wrote was “a lightning bolt” for him when he studied design. I also wish there were a biography of Lloyd himself. One case in the gallery was devoted to ephemera from his investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee; he refused the summons to testify and I found his words on the subject deeply satisfying: “I’m no hero, but I hate to get down on my knees unless I’m planting onions or looking for collar buttons.” They put me in mind of E.B. White.

After we’d done some practice sheets (the kids wrote out the Shakespeare quotations they’d memorized), each of us penned a weathergram — a poem of only about ten words written on a strip of paper from a grocery bag and hung outdoors to weather — and found a home for it on Reed’s grounds. There was lunch and a merry game of Capture the Flag, girls against boys. I only played defense because, although I am old and out of shape in comparison to your average healthy ten-year-old, I have much longer legs. But I made those boys think twice about an assault on our pile of cones. It was bliss.

Even better was the chance afterward to peek into the Special Collections library, a treasure trove of ancient books — Ptolemy, Pliny, antiphonaries, bestiaries, Isaac Newton — and beautiful art books of more recent vintage. The children had to hold the elevator for the adults who couldn’t tear themselves away at the end.

I returned to my usual job, which currently consists of wresting an algebra book out of InDesign —a program I am totally unqualified to use — and wished I could be spending this much time hand-lettering the darn thing or setting it in metal type. It feels ironic that, at a school so heartily devoted to making things by hand, I’ve got the job of translating it all for the outside world via computer. (Nobody senses this irony better than my husband, who knows just how limited my competence with computers actually is.)

I find myself longing for Ada to be a few years older so that she and I can make things together. I don’t want to rush these sweet baby days of wonder and discovery, but I picture setting up a scriptorium in the living room bay and the two of us crafting hand-lettered books. Right now my future calligrapher is screaming about the indignity of nap time and gnashing her stuffed otter with her gums in frustration, so we have a little way to go. I’d better go read her a book. One step at a time.

Oh, and my favorite thing from the Reynolds exhibit, a tiny woodblock print only an inch and a half wide:

The same is true of winter hats — who hasn’t, in a hurry to be done, started the crown decreases too early and left the ear lobes exposed as a result? — and my daughter has just outgrown both her warm ones. Also, I am not optimistic enough to expect real warmth in the month of June, particularly at daybreak when my husband often buckles our girl into her pack and heads off to the coffee shop. (They bring me coffee in bed. I know. It’s an excellent arrangement.)

My kid has an enormous head. It’s in the 97th percentile, while her weight is 65th. Having spent many years looking at her father, I am not surprised that this turned out to be the case. (And I’m very grateful she was willing to start small at birth and then grow that noggin really rapidly once she was out.) But the hats sized for children 1-3 years old don’t fit any more, so I thought I’d best take an actual measurement before knitting her a new hat to make sure it would fit for next winter. Eighteen and a half inches, my friends. This translated to the Adult Small size of the pattern I’d chosen. Not the Toddler size or the Child size, the Adult Small. Ada is wiggly in general and also wanted to pull the measuring tape off her head to examine and taste it, so it’s possible I was off a little bit, but I thought I’d better play it safe. Adult Small it was, though I did go down a needle size because, really, Adult Small? An apprentice teacher at my school taught her class to use their own Reasonableness Detectors to check answers to math problems (you subtracted and got something bigger than the original number… does that make sense?), and this was pinging mine. But I didn’t go so far as making a swatch or anything. Another thing I’ve learned from Elizabeth Zimmermann is that a hat is an excellent swatch its own self. Plus the yarn was so delicious that I had no choice but to knit it RIGHTNOW.

Mopsy, from Blue Moon Fiber Arts… it’s my new favorite. You’ll never believe it’s only 10% angora. Cozy doesn’t begin to describe it. I want to knit a sleeping bag out of this stuff. And it loves to cable. I felt compelled to cable all the ribs on the hat even though the pattern doesn’t call for it.

Here we’re wearing it Dutch Girl style, with the ear flaps turned up. But turned down and pushed back is pretty hilarious, like Princess Leia on a wagon train. (I think the flaps will lie flatter if I actually give the hat a bath and a bit of blocking, but it’s tempting not to.)

And yeah, it’s plenty big for next winter. And the one after that.

P.S. This grown-up girl said “Mama” yesterday and I think she may actually have meant it. She was in bed with me, clambering about and practicing standing up, looking pleased as punch with herself when she managed it. I could see the wheels spinning as she thought, “The only way this situation could be more excellent is if I were also nursing right now.” So she huffed and puffed and bumbled herself sideways, stooped for the attack, then looked up at me with a big, milky, toothless grin and said, “Mama!” I’ll take it.

]]> http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/05/may-is-for-winter-knits/feed/ 16 http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/04/curiouser-and-curiouser/ http://www.bluegarter.org/2011/04/curiouser-and-curiouser/#comments Sun, 10 Apr 2011 21:20:19 +0000 Sarah http://www.bluegarter.org/?p=1810 That’s my eight-month-old girl these days: keenly attuned to the world around her and eager to participate, investigate, manipulate, and mouth. She has an infectious laugh, a frank gaze, unshakable determination, a bottomless appetite, and a sense of humor. Yesterday she pulled off my hat, covered my face with it, then snatched it away and chortled at me — her first initiation of Peek-a-boo. Oh, and did I mention that her cheeks are both glorious and delectable?

Here she’s just waking up from a snooze during a walk at the Sandy River delta:

(And yes, a handknit in action — my mostly Selbu Modern cloche is still a favorite!)

My little lass is no longer quite such a terrible napper, either. On Friday morning she slept — hallelujah! — for two glorious hours. I felt as though I’d sprinted into the end zone of Mamadom and made the game-winning catch. As a dance of victory and thanksgiving, I sewed my Ada a perfectly adorable pair of pants, which I can’t wait to show you when the weather gets warm enough for thin cotton. (I made them too big for now, as this weather cannot be expected until the fifth of July.)

I’d like to be writing here more often to say so, but we are keeping well.

I was so delighted to find she’d grown into this. Daphne made it for her and I think it may be the cutest sweater ever. Those stripy sleeves! Speaking of stripes, she’s also wearing this now:

Still loving the toes. I swear I try to get her to do something else in photos, but up go the feet…

But it turns out I didn’t get the shoulders quite right. I need to overlap the fronts and backs more, which may mean changing the shaping a bit as well. So we’ll call this an Okoboji prototype and I’ll add it to my list of designs that need to be tweaked and re-knit…. Anyway, back to the gifts. A fabulous blanket arrived last week from my dear New York knitting friends:

Psst… look who learned to sit, just like a real person!

Knowing my eternal admiration for Elizabeth Zimmermann, they collaborated on a Mystery Blanket for Ada. (That’s a Ravelry link; go check out the many beautiful versions others have made so you can really see what it looks like. I’ll try to get a better photo of this one.) This is the April project from The Knitter’s Almanac and EZ’s singular genius for imagining new constructions is on full display: the squares are knit from the center out and never bound off, but rather grafted together. I’ve knit a few squares of it myself for inclusion in that crazy log cabin-ish blanket that’s languishing at the bottom of my workbasket, and it is fun. As long as you don’t mind grafting. (Which I don’t. But not everyone enjoys it the way I do, and therefore I’m extra impressed that my dear friend Lisa put in as many hours of it as I know she had to for the finishing of this project.) This blanket is soft, soft, soft, and we’re loving it thoroughly.

Thank you, my knitting friends! We wish you all lived in Portland!