Mountain Projects - Brambleberry Sweater

I've promised and promised to put these projects on my blog, and now here it is - a Friday afternoon in late April (Good Friday, in fact), and the Mountain is now a happy memory.

But not to worry! That's why blogs exist!

This is the first of several posts about projects I work on at the annual Atlanta Knitting Guild retreat at The Mountain in North Carolina. It is a wonderful, calming, peaceful place, way up at the ankle of the Appalachian Mountains (Atlanta being the foothills, North Carolina would be the ankles, no?). Everyone brings projects that they often cannot work on anywhere else, due to the association with The Mountain, the amount of concentration needed to work on a project, or the help they will receive from other knitters over the long weekend. And that's basically what it is: show up after noon-ish on Friday, snack, knit, eat dinner, knit, begin to taste Knitting Water, and continue knitting into the weee hours of the next day.

Sleep.

Repeat.

For an entire long weekend.

Some other projects I've worked on have been a wedding shawl for my friend and former colleague, for whom I cast on 400 stitches! a project that could only have been accomplished with many stitch markers, the complete silence of other understanding knitters, and a few swigs of Knitting Water.

I also knit Webmaster Bill his two cable-knit sweaters, the first out of Chester Farms yarn out of Virginia, a thick, durable, "wears like iron" wool yarn that is 100% machine washable. I found out while knitting that sweater that you can fudge the fact that you didn't count your rows properly, and can crochet an edging to make the arm decreases look like knit decreases instead of purl-on-the-right-side decreases. You can, you really can . . .

The second was a beautiful off-white sweater featuring yarn from Blackwater Abbey Yarns, available only through the distributor in Colorado (or from Abbey Farm in Ireland). I had had a trunk show with Blackwater Abbey Yarns while my friend was still in my employ - she is a huge fan of the designer Beth Brown-Reinsel who has designed a number of Aran and Guernsey-style sweaters out of this yarn. The yarn is also a traditional Irish Aran yarn, and not at all appealing to the soft scarf crowd, but it still proved to be a fruitful trunk show and one which I wish I could have had again. And many of the sales were to staff and owner, but that's just one of the perks of working in the yarn shop!

So, my project for the Mountain (stay on topic!) was my sweater out of this beautiful, handwash only yarn, using a pattern designed for this yarn (not by BB-R) called "Brambleberry." I used a fall-ish orangey rust yarn, and I did my swatches. Oh, boy, did I do my swatches! But more on that later.

The pattern is a little different, in that the chart is read from left to right on the right side of the pattern, and the reverse on the wrong side. Which is opposite all the other charted patterns I've ever used. Another difference is the reversal of odd-is-right, even-is-wrong row counting. Needless to say, Knitting Water has helped make these pattern differences even more clear, and has taken the sting out of ripping back and re-knitting those rows until I began to focus on the pattern's quirks.

I started this pattern 2 Mountain trips ago, in 2009, with a cast-on and knitting of the back. And you know what? After I figured out the pattern changes, it really was an easy pattern to knit. Seriously. It's only on R2 that you have to cable, and you knit the majority of the body repeating the same 8 rows. Very, very simple for late night conversation.

Then you get to do the traveling cables as you decrease for the arms, a factor which adds its very own magic to the design of the sweater. Some concentration, and no Knitting Water was involved (in fact, I think I did these decreases at home, but I wouldn't swear to it), and it makes the sweater design really cool.

Last year's Mountain stay featured knitting the front of this sweater, and one of the things I wanted to make certain of was that I was a) familiar with the pattern by this year's Mountain stay, and b) ready to start on the sleeves by doing a): finishing the front before I got to The Mountain. Which I did with the help of some very brave bunnies, as featured in that marvelous masterpiece, Watership Down, as a book on tape. Meaning I knitting into the evening and heard one of my favorite books read aloud as only a gifted storyteller can.

As promised, here are the pictures:

This is the back of the Brambleberry sweater. I only wish the color was more true - it's an orangy reddish leaf color.








This is much more true to the actual color of the yarn itself. This is a detail of the sweater. What makes the cables stand out so amazingly is the Z-twist of the yarn - it's spun in reverse. Most yarns and threads produced commercially or privately by spinners create an S-twist. But not this yarn.



This is the front of the sweater. Notice the deep neckline, an indication of it being the front, and also the double-decreasing at both sides while knitting the traveling cables.

I now have greater respect for the professional photographers who make the pictures on patterns look just perfect! It's hard to see the detail, but the traveling cables start right at the arm decreases.




Why this picture of a scrap of knitting, you ask? Why, this is no ordinary scrap of knitting: this is my swatch. I knit it with three different needles, then washed the swatch to see how my individual needle choices would come out. After all, I was going to spend at least 3 years of my life on this project, and I wanted it to be perfect.

You know what I found? Not just the needle size but the needle type makes all the difference with this project. My gauge was the same whatever needle size I used, BTW.

My first needle option was a size 6, since I tend to knit loose. Not so much fun knitting with these needles on a 2-ply Worsted Weight yarn. That's the scrunched up bit at the bottom.

My second needle option was a Bryspun plastic size 7 needle. Soft on the hand and easy to manuver the yarn over and around. Great, I thought, but I'll try one more. Plus, the pattern called for a 7 though my gauge didn't change at all.

My third option was size 8 bamboo. And that made all the difference.

Remember when I said that I had washed and blocked my swatch after I knit it? Well, the portion I knit with the size 6 was all hard to pull - no give whatsoever. But the portion I knit with the nice, soft, easy-to-manuver Bryspun? It turned flat. There was no definition in my cables, they relaxed almost to the point of being just an embellishment on the pattern and not the pattern itself. I could not believe my hands, and the more knitters I've shown it to, the more my reality about using these needles has been correct.

So my final option, of the bamboo size 8's, was right on the money. The cables were crisp and at attention, and maybe because the wood offers resistance to the wool it makes the cables stand up the way they do.

That's my lesson for the day - always, always wash your swatch, and keep knitting on the same swatch so that you can see one variation from the other. Very, very, important.

Oh, and before I sign off, here are the promised sleeves, started this year at the Mountain (I had forgotten that the rows are read reversed, so after 7 rows I poured some more Knitting Water to take the sting out of ripping them out and starting again). And one more thing - I'm knitting both sleeves together/at the same time. This way I can keep up with the pattern and its myriad of increases. Like the ones I forgot right at the very beginning, which is fine because I have small wrists, and heavily increased sleeves would just hang on my wrists like flappy bits of knitted fabric. My arms increase after the elbow, and by golly, that's just where these extra increases are going to go!

Here are the pictures:


There is more knit on them now, of course. My goal here is to finish the sleeves by this autumn, to either knit the pieces together and wear this sweater at The Mountain (it gets pretty darn cold up there, let me tell ya!) or sew it together next year while there.

OK, well, that's my first of these posts of Mountain projects. Will put some more up (I've taken tons of pictures), and hopefully all the posts will be current by the time I go on next year's retreat!

Theolonius is Begun!

Here are the sock pics just taken with my cast-on row for the Ravelry Sock Knit-along for Theolonius.


P.S. It looks intimidating!


P.P.S. It was! So many extra stitch markers!! I even noted which ones I used where!

A Peaceful New Year

Yes, there is something about this time of the year. All the hectic Christmas knitting is done (thank you, Atlanta-area Shop Hop!), the packages are mailed, the kinfolk have visited and been visited by, and the overindulgence is finally over. Having had no traffic to drive through to and from work has kept me re-juvenated, too. It's just that time of the year when there's a little extra energy to spend on projects.

Like blogging.

I really, really enjoy blogging. I enjoy planning what stitched/knitted pieces I'm going to write about, taking picture of them, composing a draft blog in my brain whilst I assemble the pieces for picture-taking, and all of the writing I seem to do once I log onto my NNW blog. And I really, really appreciate how y'all are reading these postings and seem to be enjoying them in your leisure time.

So why haven't I posted in a while? Well, September was a busy month, then came October, and all the while I've been seeing my two-week temp assignment become extended and more involved. Which is fantastic - I'm working in areas that I had considered as possible job options while I was in the process of closing the shop, and am working with a terrific bunch of folks. It's interesting, too, to be in the position again of being an employee after so many years of being the employer; I really think I've gained insight into what an employer really expects and how best to do a task that is asked of me.

To bring everyone up to date, after my blog posting in September, Webmaster Bill decided that I needed to have a happy birthday celebration on Tybee Island, so we spent a long weekend down there in a hotel on the beach. I was really impressed with a small wildlife museum that was close by, and all the work they're doing to keep the sea turtle populations healthy and thriving. When we were there, in late September, 10 of the 11 nests had hatched and they were just waiting for the last one to hatch in the next week or so. Yay! Baby sea turtles! They had a couple in salt water tanks in the museum, and they are really so cute and so tiny! It's hard to believe they grow up to be so huge.

Then October I spent learning about wildlife rehabilitation. You see, there was this explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last April . . . oh wait, you already knew about that, right? Of course you do! So I wanted to help save everything, like I usually do, and I went on the website that spring for the Audobon Society to see when they needed me to come down and save brown pelicans and dolphins and everything else that was covered in oil. So I filled out their on-line volunteer form and it asked questions like, "Can you type?" (of course I can type - 120 wpm was my top speed, thank you very much) and "Can you answer phones?" (well, yes) and "Can you file?" (oh, if you could only see me file!). But then at the bottom was a question "Do you have wildlife rehabilitation experience?" and I thought, 'Well, no, but I could get some.' On-line again I found an organization that teaches folks to be wildlife rehabilitators or updates the skills and knowledge of current rehabbers. They have classes all over the US and Canada and some even in Brazil and they were scheduling one for Knoxville over Halloween weekend. Did I let a few invites to a few Halloween parties stop me in my quest to save all wild animals? Oh my, no.

Learning about wildlife rehabilitation was an amazing experience. I read the book, remembered all my basic anatomy courses and cell stuff, re-learned how to do fractions and use a calculator (after all, how much calcium do you feed a growing owl that weighs x lbs. and calcium comes in mg tablets?) after all these years, and it all came back with a loud *wumph.* I took a long weekend and drove up to Knoxville in the late fall (yes, it was a beautiful trip), found my hotel thanks to Mapquest, found a local brewpub for the weekend evenings, and just really learned a new skill. Will I use it immediately? Well, no, but I did find a place near me that has opportunities when I want to take them to assist with the myriad of tasks that must crop up when rehabilitating wildlife, and will take some time this winter to stay in touch with them.

Oh, and before I forget it, here's the link to the organization I took the course from: it's called International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council and their website is here: theiwrc.org. Talk about a dedicated, amazing group of people; I'm glad I could be a part of their lives and carry what I know back into the world with me.

November and December were Christmas knitting months for all the great-nieces and -nephews. No, I didn't take pictures; I didn't want to post and then ruin the surprise. And I was too overjoyed to finish all of them (well, almost all!) in time for shipping before Christmas. I have asked some of the recipients to allow me to post their baby sweater pictures, though, so we'll see if there are baby sweater pictures in the next few months! Several that I did make were by Roo Designs; their designs are adorable, very versatile, and put fun animals on the front (which means intarsia which also means yarn ends. I really, really dislike weaving in yarn ends.). Their website it here: Roo Designs.com, and while Sheepish doesn't carry them at the moment, you can probably ask them to order you a few, just to try. I'll warn you, though - they're addictive!

OK, well, here we are . . . at the end of a pretty long blog post (again!). Thank you all for reading down this far, and I hope you all have a happy and prosperous New Year!

A Project for Meeee!

At last, at last, at last, here it is: an opportunity to do some stitching, from my very own stash, for my very own self!! And stitching - not knitting, not sweaters or socks or gorgeous shawls, but good, ol' fashioned counted cross stitch. Want to know when was the last time I stitched something for me and not for Nease's Needlework? 2003.

That was the year that the knitting craze really took over, when my dear Gwen came to work for me, when I put aside all fancy scissors and small needles and gorgeous threads and I picked up knitting for real.

In early 2003, I stitched a beautiful Eva Rosenstand piece of a wren in the furze. You know the old English rhyme: The wren, the wren/The king of all birds/St. Stephen's Day/Got caught in the furze. It hearkens back to the custom of young boys on St. Stephen's Day chasing a wren across the land until the poor thing just died of exhaustion. Then these boys would bring the wren's body back to the village and received food and praise for their terrible deed. (I really wonder how many wrens really got away? Probably a lot more than got caught. I know that MY stitched wren got away!!).

So I don't have a picture of THAT wren, which I initialed and dated 2003, but I do have a picture of the companion piece I bought, back in about 2001, when the great and wonderful Eva Rosenstand company (from Copenhagen) was about to close its doors and end its absolutely lovely and colorful and nature-inspired designs. They never sold well in my shop; people either disliked the idea of kits ("I want to pick out my own threads or fabrics") or the kits themselves were just a little too old-fashioned for my hip, new, mod patrons. Remember how popular angels were for a while there? These angel stitchers were very talented, and perhaps these simple but beautiful kits of blues and yellows and oranges were just a little too simple for their tastes. Regardless, I still bought a bunch of small kits before they went out of production.

*side note* The Eva Rosenstand company did not in the end go away - they were bought by Permin of Copenhagen, a Danish subsidiary of Wichelt Imports, so their designs still exist. The threads now are DMC threads, and the linens are regular linen, not the soft and supple linen that was milled by the E.R. company nor the threads dyed by E.R. It's a color-snob thing, I know, but the more colors there are in this world, the more lovely a place it is for all of us *sigh*

Anyway, on to the pictures of my little blue-tit (I think that's the name of the bird!):

It's such a simple design, really. The yellows match the furze of the wren - I've always seen these as companion pieces. And look how big the graph is!! It's easy to read!! It's larger than the stitched piece on the linen. It has symbols that are logical in their set-up (meaning, black is a large big square, then the yellows are lighter symbols, etc.).





Aren't these colors just lovely? Don't they just make you want to pick them up and play with them and see this pretty design come to life on your fabric? There's just something about them that makes me lose all ability to put thoughts into words. But look how many threads of each color there are!! At least twice and a half as you'll ever need for such a small piece of a bird. And you separate the threads into bundles and you get to play with them even before you begin to stitch. Antici *say it!* pation!


Here's the oh-so-recognizable packaging for this little kit:


Remember that packaging from way back when?? I know, it's hard to keep the glare off of the plastic, but I just had to show the packaging anyway.

The other cool thing about having a kit like this in plastic is that you can take it to an outdoor festival. Which I did back in May over Memorial Day, and four of us sat in a corner of the outdoor shed and all of us stitched our projects. Webmaster Bill came by and said that we looked like the 4 Fates (I forget what he said the 4th one was - maybe a new Fate who foresees the future?). It was so much fun to be stitching with others, especially after so many years of knitting with others. It's a different feel - you hold the fabric in your hands, you bring the needle up and down, the design appears as if by magic on your linen, and there's always a brief pause in the conversation when the rhythm of your stitching reminds you that you need to pay attention.

Oh, and another note: I've begun wearing reading glasses when I stitch on linen. Guess I'm over 40 now and my eyes are catching up with me! I stole, uh, borrowed a pair of reading glasses from the storage unit. They're tacky, but they haven't sold so I figure I'll just break them in so that I can brag about what a great product they are. It's nice to be able to see the individual threads on the linen bigger than they really are, so that my eyes don't get as tired as easily and I make no mistakes when I wear them (I finally started making mistakes stitching over 2 threads while stitching on linen - yech!). Now I wear them, they're tacky, they remind me that I better start stitching quickly, and I can see well enough with them to stitch waaaay past my bedtime.


These are the glasses in their little Chinese puzzle box. Aren't they tacky? But they work, and it's just me and Webmaster Bill, and the cats, none of whom care that *sniff* I look like an old woman now!!

I had really, really forgotten how easily I lose myself when stitching a piece of counted cross stitch. Honestly. It's like having a whole afternoon to, say, update your blog, then you realize your butt hurts and your fingers ache, and lo and behold, you've been sitting in the same chair for an hour and a half. Stitching is like that for me. I spent one Saturday afternoon earlier this summer (July, was it?) just watching a couple of movies and stitching. Then I looked up and it was 5 hours later and I hadn't stitched as much as I thought I would, but time had ceased to exist for me. And if there was a weekend marathon on cable of the TV show "House"? Oh, then just forget about me going to sleep for a while!

Dave the Dog

I know, I know, it's over a year since our sweet friend Dave the Dog died, but I was not in a good place when he passed last spring, and I just didn't have it in me to write out what should be a masterpiece of puppy passing. Then full-time Temp gigs starting picking up, creating a positive cashflow at home, but also taking over my daytime blogging hours.

And then on evenings I was often at my storage unit filling orders (yay orders! They just keep comin'), and weekends I've spent gardening and reading and working on my stash (both stitching and knitting), especially the 5 baby sweaters I knit over the winter, and there was just not the time to write out all the wonderful things that Dave was. Plus, this time delay helped me consolidate what my thoughts were and where my pictures were (always helpful in a blog posting!).

Here's the picture that we showed at his memorial service, thanks to the great folks at Paws, Whiskers, and Wags:



Yes, for all you Atlantans, this IS the snowfall from March 1, 2009. We knew that it would be Dave's last opportunity to play in the snow, and we wanted him to be able to enjoy it. Even here he looks unhappy, with his hindquarters not even able to hold him up and his normally happy face all kind of downward-turning. (For those who don't know, PW&W is a local pet crematory that is a wonderfully compassionate place, staffed by people who love pets and know the grief of losing one. They have an annual ceremony where people who've used their services over the past year come together in a Celebration of Life to grieve and see all the other sweet pets who have also passed. It's a wonderful healing time. The website for Paws, Whiskers, & Wags is here.)

Here are some more photos of Dave, taken when we brought him with us to Webmaster Bill's brother's house up in Springfield over Thanksgiving, 2008. We had to opportunity to see our new great-nephew, and our newly-wedded niece who lives in Chicago who brought her dog, too.





He still looks kind of sad, even though he had visited the Springfield folks before. He certainly enjoyed the visit this time, having a little boy and another dog to sniff, too.

And here's a picture we took on the way up to Springfield, when we stopped by a place called Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky at a wildlife preserve where we saw red wolves, a bald eagle (and two in the wild!), and other wonderful animals under the care of some very loving Park Rangers. We were taking Dave out to sniff and to go for a walk:


Dave loved to sniff. In fact, he sniffed sometimes to the exclusion of all else, even walking. No matter how hard I tried to persuade him that he could smell things as he walked along, he still had to at least try to sniff out what was under a bunch of leaves.

Dave came to us via a phone call from a mutual friend who had a friend working at the Lithonia Animal Hospital. A box of puppies had been dropped off at the vet (fortunately, it was at the vet and not on the side of the road), and they were looking for good homes. All of the puppies who were left (there had been a total of 12) were either black or yellow labs with their big puppy feet and square heads. Dave, though, had this small body, these legs longer than his body was tall, and this pair of ears that stuck out straight to the side as he literally perked up his ears to hear what was going on around him.

With the streamlined shape of his head, his loooong legs, and his large barrel (chest), he had all the makings of a whippet with the constitution of a lab. He loved to run, he would somehow curl up his legs on his bed to make a "Dave ball" (I still don't know how he did it), and he was a little high-strung when it came time for training. All whippet traits, but with the coat of a lab and the desire from his earliest puppyhood to be right where his people were (very much lab traits). I still remember him as a brand new puppy jumping up and down on those long legs of his to try to get onto the bed, because that's where his people were. When we moved to Decatur, during the winter months, he would jump with his Lassie jump (oh, so graceful) over the back rail of the bed, then stop instantly and curl himself up into a Dave ball where he hoped he would be unnoticed by us. And he'd never get up on the bed in the summer, except to sleep on it when we weren't there (I guess it was cooler?).

He also had learned about shoes and humans during the time we still lived on 11th Street in Midtown and I had injured my knee in martial arts. I was job-hunting at the time, having been laid off from a computer company, and one afternoon Dave needed to go out. I was having a hard time walking around because of my knee, so Dave took himself into the bedroom and got my shoes AND my socks, to alleviate any extra walking on my part. Just like that - no prompting, just knowing that his Susan was injured and needed help. From then on, he would bring us our outdoor shoes from wherever they were in the house, pretty much until 3 years or so before he died, just when we adopted Max. Maybe he saw that other dogs didn't have to bring their persons' shoes to them in order to go out?? Still, it was a great trick and we really loved to be able to encourage him in that "endeavor" of his.

Dave was the first dog I had for whom I realized the necessity of crate training and formal dog training. He had a penchant for chewing when we first got him - rugs, my left shoes (never my right ones), skirts, and a little bit of a table leg. Never mind that we had chew toys all over the apartment for him to chew - he had to chew what was forbidden. It all was too much, and we went down to our locally owned pet supply store where we bought our first dog crate. He had some anxiety about going into his crate as some dogs do, but then we saw the movie "All of Me" with Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin. We were both working for an Indian-owned company at the time and laughed during the parts when the Indian guru is trying to make sense out of what the silly Anglos wanted him to do with Lily Tomlin's spirit. We chose the phrase "Back in Bowl" to be Dave's training signal for stopping all activity and going in the crate. And you know what? The crate training worked. After a few months Dave learned what we wanted him to do and not do, and we never had a problem after that.

He was never a rambunctious dog for all of his high-strunged-ness, but he was always there to greet us when we came home, to let us know that he would like one more ear scratching before bed by thumping his tail against a hard surface, and that it was time for me to stop staring at my computer for so many hours when I worked at home on Tuesdays by poking me with his nose round about 4:00 every Tuesday afternoon to go on a walk around the neighborhood.

He was so loyal in the ways that dogs are, and despite the fact that he was in obvious pain - the walks were becoming shorter, he couldn't stand for more than a few minutes without his hindquarters giving out, he couldn't jump on the bed that last winter - his heart was still good and loyal and he just didn't want to leave his people. But as so many people have said to themselves and to their vets, we just couldn't stand to see him suffer any more. Our vet was kind and loving, too, the staff as well as the veterinarian herself, and when I had to make that phone call to say "it's time," they set up the appointment for the next day, let us in by a back door to give us some privacy, have some last time with Dave, though they still had to sedate him in order to put the tubes in by which they would administer that last dose. But he had looked so sad for so long, he had suffered with pain for so long, and it just wasn't going to get any better. Even our veterinarian was crying when she administered the shot - she was a professional who had worked with us every step of the way to make these last few months possible.

Dave was born during that horribly hot summer of 1993 (when the temps were in the 100's for several weeks), found his way to a caring vet to get the care he needed to come be our canine companion, helped bark away the homeless guys when we lived in Midtown, barked fiercely when we first moved to the 'burbs until he realized he didn't need to, did a Lassie jump onto our bed during cold winter nights, and brought us our shoes for nearly 16 years. He left us on April 21, 2009, and we will always remember him.