A Mitten Series

The final project for our Zimmermania class this year was mittens. I ended with this because I thought that during the holidays, it would be good to end with a simple little project. I knew I would have to work on finishing up the quilting block of the month and wouldn't have much time, and I figured that with the holidays, everyone else would be in the same boat. What could go wrong with a mitten?

So I started making mittens. These are Elizabeth Zimmermann's Mitered Mittens from Knitter's Almanac, and I thought they'd be fun in a nice orange yarn. I used one of my new favorites, Shepherd's Shades. I used Elizabeth's thumb trick, where you knit using waste yarn to make the thumb hole.

But I was disappointed with them: The center seam pulled funny at the thumb.


I decided to try them in Kureyon, thinking that the stripes would be fun, and I figured I could try out Elizabeth's other thumb trick: clipping a little bit and unraveling to create a thumbhole. As I was knitting them, the mittens seemed small, but I kept thinking they'd be okay. They weren't. They were too small.

No need to hyperventilate. Clipping for the thumb was really no big deal. I never bothered picking up the live stitches, so it started fraying--especially since every time I tried on the mittens, they were so tight that they pulled on those stitches.

I did like the waste-yarn method better, so I decided to try again using that method.

Oh--and also, in the meantime, I discovered that I had been knitting the pattern wrong all along, neglecting to put in a straight round after each mitered round. That made the mittens too small. I decided to try the mittens in the orange yarn again. I did my rounds the correct way.

They were huge.

I took a break for a few days.

*****

Now, the truth of the matter is, if we hadn't started this mitten in class, and I hadn't promised 20 people that I would have a good thumb for them in December, there is a very good chance I would have abandoned the project at this point.

But 20 people were halfway through their mittens and were depending on me to give thumb advice. The thought of having to face all those people with their half-done mittens in a few weeks was motivating.

I searched through my stash and found a yarn that I had once bought specifically with mittens in mind. By this time, I had concluded that the thumb needed to be closer to the edge of the mitten than the pattern specified. (I could have made the decision to put in a gusset, but I didn't feel like changing the pattern that much.)

I started another mitten. It was way too big. So I reduced the number of stitches and started again. This mitten seemed a bit small, but Kevin said it was fine. So I kept knitting.

Dear Kevin: I love you very much, but I do not need any help with my Knitter's Denial. I have plenty of denial on my own.

So I unraveled it and started again, adding 4 more stitches.

This time, finally.

I ended up with a nice pair of mittens that fit the way I wanted them, and the seams are relatively straight near the thumbs. Okay, Zimmermaniacs, I am ready for you. In December, we'll do thumbs--and you'll see just how easy it really is.

I am both relieved and happy.

My Second Wrap

Sometimes


you make something

that you absolutely
love.


Pattern: Knitting at Knoon "Wrap Me Up."
Yarn: Noro Yuzen

Our next class for this project will start in January.

A Learning Weekend

I spent the weekend at the Tiadaughton Quilt Guild's show. The guild is up in Williamsport, and when I do this one, I stay with my Aunt Ellen, one of my father's 6 brothers and sisters, who lives nearby in Jersey Shore. (Which, for those of you non-Pennsylvanians who are now confused, is nowhere near New Jersey. It is a little town in the mountains of PA.)

My father's mother was a quilter, and my aunt is also a quilter. (Come to think of it, I guess I am too.)

I worked all day at the show, but Aunt Ellen and I got a few evenings together.

Friday night we talked. We're related that way: we can both talk.

Then we had a good time on Saturday evening going through my grandmother's trunk. My aunt had never gone through it before. I suspect we spent way too much time on it and that this tuckered her out--but I kept pulling stuff out because she kept egging me on.

My grandparents have both been gone a long time now, but grandma saved a lot of things, and I am glad she did. It was interesting to see things like her high-school flag:

(That flag is from the West Branch Iowa High School.)

A doily I'm sure she made:

And a child's apron that must have belonged to her with that "M" (for Maud) on the pocket and the tatting around the edge:


And a bunch of pictures. I was particularly interested in this picture of her with her two sisters (grandma is on lower left; I think I kinda look like her):


And I love this picture of my grandmother's uncle (left) and grandfather (right), who was a Civil War vet (yup, a Yankee):

The Civil War is only 5 generations behind me. That's not really so long ago.

But the whole reason we looked at all this stuff in the first place was to see my grandmother's wedding dress.

The story of the wedding is interesting. My grandmother had been working in the Treasury Department at the Smithsonian Institution (which is probably as good a place as any for the Treasury Department to be):


...and apparently got word that her best friend Jessie, who was married to Clarence Spencer, had died.

Jessie's father implored my grandmother to come and marry Clarence, to raise the two children of that marriage.

My grandmother said that if he was good enough for Jessie, then he was good enough for her, so she went north to the dairy farm near Canton, PA, and they got married. I'm not sure of the exact year offhand.

I am sure from looking at it that she made her dress. This dress was originally longer, but my grandmother modified it into a fancy short dress for my Aunt Ellen when she was a girl. (My grandmother as an adult was approximately the size of a 5th-grader. I thought of her as small even as a young child.) I can envision this dress long and think it would have been gorgeous. And I'm all over the light pink.


Here's a closeup of that lace:


Thanks, grandma, for keeping your dress so I could see it.

*****

Where was I? Ah, yes. I was at a quilting show. The show was wonderful, but I would like to talk here about my aunt's quilting, since that's where I was. Aunt Ellen's eyes and arms have gotten worse over the past few years so she can't really use her sewing machine, so her solution to this is:

to hand piece.

I love people who won't let anything stop them.

This wonderful lighthouse quilt of hers was in the show this year:


Don't you love the scrappy dimensional blues and whites together?

Last year when I was there, she had just started it.

This year, when I got to her house, she was working on a chicken quilt. I wasn't permitted to take a photo of it since it wasn't finished, but let me just explain that there were chickens all over that quilt.

Aunt Ellen, I know you read this blog. Let me just say that I want to see some finished chickens next year when I come back!

Hard-Nosed Businesswomen



Today Kim and I attended a conference called EWE, which stands for Entrepreneurial Women's Expo. We had a good day. We got to set up a little exhibit-table that showed what we did, and we got to meet a lot of pleasant women who own their own businesses.

Throughout the day, we heard a lot of speakers talking about things like setting goals, taking care of ourselves, and so forth, and they all had good tips. We also learned that we're supposed to laugh and have fun. We quickly adapted to the clown noses.

We learned that you're not supposed to dual task. For some reason, at that, everyone at the table turned and looked at me. And then one person said, "You're knitting!"

This is the mitered mitten I was knitting at the table, from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac. As always, it is a completely fun knit. The mitten doesn't have thumbs yet. You get to snip the yarn to make them.

Heh. I can't wait to make everyone in Zimmermania quake in their shoes over that trick.


Anyway, the other thing that happened was that they announced that there was something under the booths of the vendors and we should look for it. I crawled right under that table and looked really hard....



but the only thing I found was the hotel's wireless router.

It turned out that if you were a vendor, you could win a prize if there was a very large bow under your booth. I am going to guess that the bow would be easy to find without crawling, if you were dressed like most of the people there, in good clothes.

Pi Shawl Come True

Kim often calls me "girlie girl," and for a long time, despite my belief that Sephora = Mecca, my penchant for jewelry, my not having seen my actual hair color in 30 years, and yes, even my very profession, I have always brushed her off. But I no longer can: I have succumbed to ruffles.


I started this shawl in January 2009, as the first project of my Zimmermania class (a class that pays homage to Elizabeth Zimmermann, the knitter with the biggest cult following of all time).

I told the class that they were to use this simple project as their go-to project--something easy that they could just pick up anytime, anywhere, and it would last them a year in between other projects. And that's how I treated it.

Till this month. Suddenly, it seemed time to get it finished, even though my year wasn't quite up.


The shawl could not be easier to knit. It is just a big circle (with increases based on ... pi!) But it takes a long time and has a lot of stitches. (Warning: Do not read the next two sentences if you are in the middle of a pi shawl.) I've calculated that with the way I made it, the body of the shawl had about 44,000 stitches. The ruffle, just under 15,000. (To make the ruffle, I cast on 15, went up, caught a stitch on the edge, went back down 15, went back up 11, went down 11, went back up 15 and caught a stitch, down 15, etc.--576 times.)


I went through just under 5 skeins of Kureyon sock yarn--probably about 2100 yards of yarn--to make this baby (I used 3 different colorways, and mixed 'em up).


Let's estimate that it takes me about 3 seconds on average to make a stitch. (I'm no Miriam Tegels.) If you do the math, you'll realize that with only 50 hours of knitting, this shawl can be yours.

And you know what? If I had it to do over again, I would change .... absolutely nothing.

Thank you, Elizabeth Zimmermann, for giving so many knitters so many opportunities to have so much fun.

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Each year for the entire time I have known him, Kevin has gone to the beach in August, and each year, I have stayed home. This started back when our cats were geriatric and couldn't be left alone. And I just never gained momentum to go, even when we no longer had cats. This year, I told Kevin that I would go, but there was only one condition: I would be sewing all day, every day. We went with a large group of friends, so it's not as if I was depriving him of someone to have fun with (or as if he does anything other than walk, swim, and read). And so he agreed to my conditions.

And therefore, every day, while other people walked on the beach....



Or did "pool yoga"....

I sewed. I worked about 10-12 hours per day (although on the last day it petered out to about 6, mostly on account of having to pack). But the view from my window helped; it was better than the view I would have had if I had stayed home. In fact, the thought of being able to have a view while I worked was pretty much the only reason I decided to go, other than being with Kevin for a couple of minutes each day.


Our friends kept teasing me about being on house arrest and asking how I got out of the room to eat dinner.

And as you would conclude from their comments, I got a lot done. I finished 30 out of 60 blocks on some memory quilts I am making (and I got the rest of the blocks cut out, which is no mean feat on a memory quilt):


I just about finished the center of this year's block of the month:


(Yup: That's all you get to see till it's done.)

I got one full row done on a quilt-as-you-go class I am teaching soon:


And on the 10-hour drive down and back, I got some car knitting done (although Kevin was pesky here and made me drive half the time). The beginnings of a Christmas stocking:


A little more on the pi shawl (I am loving my ruffle):


And a finished felted bag:



So it was a good week. I got a lot done.

And on those brief moments of going outside, I even made a new friend.


Gull Friends 4-Evah.

Gnome-Like = Ganomy

I admit that this wasn't my idea at all. Kirsten was my inspiration. She wore this hat to work, and in the middle of winter, a fun hat is the only way to go. So I decided to make the Ganomy hat, and when I told people what I was doing, they all corrected me: "Don't you mean gnomy?"

Nope. I mean Ganomy. This is a hat designed by Elizabeth Zimmermann. She had that kind of humor. And she had kids. Kids think this stuff is hysterically funny.

I'm sure you know a story just like this: When we were kids, my brothers and I thought that the town "Newberry" was the funniest thing ever. Whenever we would drive through, the backseat of my parents' car erupted in hysterical giggles: "Newberry! Blueberry!"

Yes, my friends, "ganomy" is the funniest word ever.

So anyway, here I am, in our waterlogged garden, our beans as thick as kudzo, looking all ganomy-like:



You're supposed to put a ping-pong ball in the tip of the hat (so the hat can float in an emergency), or else ball up scrap yarn. I found that for me, little bits of scrap yarn worked well.


I love this hat. It's made from two yarns, Brown Sheep's new Shepherd's Shades, and Ester Bitran's Talinay, alternating stripes of about 6 or 8 rows each (I forget exactly, but if you really care, you're not fully in the EZ cult).


The Talinay striped for me, except on the top stripe. No guarantees on what yours would do. The patterns is from that little gem of a book, Knitter's Almanac. (Yes, Zimmermania class, it is our next project.)

What words did you think were funny when you were a kid?