Sweater at Last

I made Kevin take a quick picture of the finished seamless hybrid yesterday (I nearly said "new" but since finishing it I've worn it at least once a weekend and some weeks during the week too, so calling it new feels funny). And here it is:



I'm mostly happy with it. I do think I should have made it slightly longer (but am too lazy to knit a new lower edge then graft it on... ), so I'm thinking about knitting a lower hem in a different but coordinating color and sewing it to the bottom--that way, the ribs wouldn't need to match. That would also have the benefit of adding a little weight around the bottom--right now, the length problem is compounded because the sweater is so light and floaty that it seems shorter than it is.

On the other hand, it's kind of pill-y (not surprising, since I knit it with yarn meant for lacy shawls, not sweaters). I can't tell if it's going to keep pilling till it vanishes in a little puff of fuzz, or if it's going to reach some kind of pill equilibrium and be OK for years (my first hourglass sweater, in Tahki Donegal Tweed, pilled like mad then stopped, maybe it's like that?). If it's going to vanish in a puff of fuzz, then I don't want to sink more yarn and knitting time at it... but on the other hand if it's about to reach pill equilibrium and last forever, I want it to be perfect.

I also should have remembered (or acted on, because I actually did remember but did nothing) that Elizabeth Zimmerman's percentage sweaters (where you figure out how many stitches you need for the body, then the rest of the directions are given as a percentage of that number) produce more tightly fitting sleeves than most people prefer these days. Other people adjust for this by starting the sleeves with a higher percentage of the body stitches that she suggests, but I didn't, so the body is looser than the sleeves. (Although now that I look at the picture, I think the sleeves have relaxed and fit just fine.)

In other news, Kevin and I went for a nice run in Look Park in Northampton on Saturday, after his class. Look Park is one of the many (many, many, many) benefits of nearly everywhere I've lived before now that I hardly took advantage of because I hardly exercised outside (in college I did step classes and stair-climbed, mostly. Hard to believe, given how much I hate stairs.).

There was a cyclocross race going on, which we thought we'd be able to watch--but the park was too woodsy for us to see the race from a distance, and the race course filled the roads/paths it was on, so we couldn't run next to the course. Plus I hate to run right next to bike races--even through I know I'm not going to leap in on to the course, there's no way for the cyclists to know that I won't.

The instructor of the road bike workshop we went to in May was very pro-cyclocross. He tried to convince us we should try it--but I think he may have misunderstood my personality (and inherent klutziness). Long bike rides: yes; courses "featuring pavement, wooded trails, grass, steep hills and obstacles requiring the rider to quickly dismount, carry the bike whilst navigating the obstruction and remount in one motion" (according to the Wikipedia entry): no.

But I've been lazy about erging, which makes me feel like I'm being lazy overall. My excuse is that each of the 6 ergs in the regular (non-crew) area of the gym has at least 1 broken component, and it's a pain to use them. If the computer works, the foot stretchers are missing one or both straps. If the straps are there, the computer regularly hallucinates and displays stroke ratings (# of strokes per minute) that cannot possibly be right. And if both the straps and computer are in working order, the chain and wheel (which provide resistance in the absence of actual water) interact as though filled with gravel.

As a result, I cannot wait for December, when winter training starts and we'll get to use the crew room's ergs. And the tanks. In the mean time, I've been running, and staring at rowing vocab on Wikipedia, because there's no Ravelry for rowers. I was transfixed by this picture of an oarlock the other day. Pathetic!

Huh

I think I mentioned that I was making the Shetland Triangle Shawl from Wrap Style? Well, I finished it over the weekend, blocked it, and am wearing it now. I used 2 of my handspun yarns, which looked like they were essentially the same color (completely by chance--I bought one of them from an Etsy seller and one at Art Fibers in August).

See?



What's funny is that they look almost the same in natural light (like in the picture), but seem completely different in artificial light, especially in my badly lit bedroom and office. I think it might be that they're close in actual color, but because they're different fibers, they catch the light differently--and in bright light, that distinction gets bleached out. Or something. In any case, I think it's fine--I used the color I had more of for the center and the smaller skein for the border.

Speaking of borders, I've started knitting the feather and fan shawl from Folk Shawls with the blue yarn I brought back from Peru.



This is the yarn that was wound together in three ply sections of maybe 10 yards each--the one that needed to be unwound, the three plies separated (they weren't plied, just slightly stuck together by fuzz), spit spliced together, then wound into one ball. I thought I'd done all 4 colors, but it turns out I still have one left (argh!).

This relates to borders because I'm going to use the darkest blue for the mostly garter stitch portion (in the center/top), then the three lighter blues for the feather and fan border. Except that my feather and fan sections won't exactly be a border, because I have approximately equal amounts of 4 colors, not 1 main color and half as much of 2 contrast colors. Who knows ow it will turn out! Can you stand the suspense?

Hello?

Someone named Judie asked a question about the stitch count in the comments of the post about my Chevron Wrap pattern, but didn't leave an email address so I can't clarify where in the pattern she is. (And I can't figure out from the email addresses/user ids of people who bought that pattern who she might be.)

If you're Judie, please comment again here, and let me know exactly which row isn't working out for you, and how many stitches you have--Schaefer Yarns had the pattern test knit and tech edited, so it should be right... but you never know!

Wait Wait...

Like all good crunchy vegetarian liberals, I give money to NPR, and about 1000 years ago, the incentive for donating was tickets to a live taping of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me at SCSU. It took most of Kevin's and my combined brain power to remember that it was last night, but we did, and we went, and it was lots of fun. (Now that we've freed up that space in our brains, think how productive we'll be!)

It was a little weird hearing everyone's voices and seeing them at the same time--it was hard to remember that those people on the stage were actually the talking, not lip-synching to the radio.

There was a reception after the taping, and at first I was worried that there would only be 8 people there and we'd have to make small talk with Peter, Carl, the panel and guest (the panel was Tom Bodett, Kyrie O'Connor, and Charles Pierce, and the guest was Christopher Buckley). After I few minutes, I realized there was nothing to worry about because our entire section had passes (Backstage passes! Laminated cards on lanyards! Which I refused to wear except while in the room where the reception was held, because I didn't want the other NPR listeners to think I was a dork. Apparently, I'm the dork who's too cool for whatever dorky thing I'm doing.), and the was no danger we'd have to talk. Or be able to, if we'd wanted.

But in those few minutes, I tried to think of things to chat with them about. Possible conversations went something like this:

1. Hi Peter. I listen to a podcast by someone who I think mentioned one time that she knew you. Maybe that she went to school with you? Anyway, she said you were funny in school too. So Heather, who doesn't know me, would say Hi if she knew I was talking to you.

2. Hi Christopher. My department has your father's papers. Everyone says Hi, by the way. Do you remember if you gave permission for Mr. Smith* to see the papers? Because he came in the day before yesterday and we couldn't find your email. Our filing system is a little... creative... so it's probably in there somewhere. Anyway, could you send that message to us again when you get a chance?

Perhaps it's just as well there were a lot of other people there. I will now segue into a semi-related story--Kevin, his parents, a friend from grad school and I were in Cleveland a few years ago for a Indians-Red Sox game. (Kevin's family is from Ohio and our friend is a big Sox fan.) We were in a food court near the ballpark eating lunch, when suddenly our friend was having a conversation with someone about the Red Sox's previous game. A real conversation--like he knew the guy, like they were friends who always talked about sports, like they always commiserated about unfair calls at away games. Except that the guy was a member of the Red Sox. I do not have that skill... not even with not-famous people. The end.

*Mr. Smith is not the researcher's real name.

Sweater in Action

Much cuter on E than on arranged on a bench.



Speaking of benches (since I'm sure I'll arrange at least some of it on one), I should take pictures of my Rhinebeck fiber...

Quick

1. Do you think the grey sweater in this Mason-Dixon Knitting post (scroll down a long way) is Saranac?

2. I bought Moppet 2 presents at Rhinebeck: clippers (for her claws) and a harness with leash. We've been practicing with the harness inside, just like the package suggested.





It's tricky to put on over all that fur, but she doesn't seem to mind it too much.

(I bought myself all kinds of spinning fiber, but no yarn. Now I just need to stop knitting long enough to spin it up.)

One and Two Halves

Look! I made a pair of socks!



Only, not quite.

It's a little weird having 2 pairs of socks underway--for all the socks I've been knitting, I usually knit them one pair at a time. But I wanted to get started with the blue pair (the one I'm designing for Schaefer, with their lovely new sock yarn--lovely, lovely, lovely, but not yet on their website), but not set aside the Waving Lace pattern (in Schaefer's Anne), so here I am.

(It's also occurred to me that the third project I have on the needles is a wrap from Schaefer's Nancy. At least they're different colors--in contrast to the time everything I was knitting was from Scahefer and in the Lillian Gilbreth colorway.)

Unexpectedly, I kind of miss the mostly mindless knitting of the sweater. I've been listening to a couple of podcasts that include book reviews and/or excerpts, and one of them (Forgotten Classics) included selections from Agatha Christie's autobiography a couple of weeks ago. Since I evidently did not learn my lesson about literary biographies when I slogged through the recent Edith Wharton biography last year (I suspect it was actually a good book, but that I am an uncultured heathen), I started Christie's autobiography last week.

It's going much better, since she's writing about things that happened, rather than endlessly discussing what her writing might or might not owe to various other mystery writers' books... which would be very difficult to do about yourself, come to think of it. So it's mostly interesting (and I'd love to be knitting and reading, which is why I miss my easy project. See how this relates to knitting?)

Except that every so often I work myself into a tizzy of annoyance because she writes about how much better things were for women, how much more free time they had, how they could do whatever they wanted, etc, before they convinced men that they should be allowed to work. And then I'm annoyed on two fronts: all that wonderful free time was only available to the middle to upper classes (in the golden period when women had all kinds of free time, Christie's family had servants, and it never seems to have crossed her mind that their female servants did not share in all the free time available to women!), and Christie only sees women as being able to do anything because the things she personally was interested in as she was growing up (art, music) and as an adult (writing) were things that women were already allowed to do. It never seems to occur to her that she would have had a completely different perspective if she'd been interested in something off limits.

It's not that I want her to write about how limited women's career options were, or how difficult servants' lives were--that's not the point of the book, after all. It's that since a big part of writing fiction is seeing things from other people's perspectives, it's interesting to me that she apparently doesn't in these cases, either at the time or in retrospect when she was writing. If she had, she would have described the same events/situations/experiences, but just skipped the few editorializing sentences about how perfect it was, or written that it suited her instead of suggesting that it was perfect.

OK, that was a digression! Maybe now I'll stop ranting to Kevin about it! What I meant to say was that I've been reading, would like to knit while I read, but need to finish a pair of socks before I start something mindless.

And I'm not sure what that mindless thing will be. I'm thinking about a couple of shawls/scarves that are mostly garter stitch or stockinette--the Wool Peddler's Shawl (sorry, these will all be Ravelry links... you should join Ravelry!), the Feather and Fan Triangle Shawl, or some kind of garter stitch wrap with ruffle, along these lines.

And there are several yarn options:

1. An unknown amount of single-ply cream wool which Rachel brought back from Peru (seems best suited to the Wool Peddler Shawl).

2. An unknown amount of four colors of blue wool I brought back from Peru (best for the Feather and Fan Shawl).

3. The remaining handpainted lace weight from the sweater plus some coordinating solid alpaca bend lace weight... but not the same coordinating solid I used for the sweater... it turns out that all my yarns coordinate... (this option seems best for the ruffled wrap).

Whichever one I've thought about most recently always seems like the best choice--any thoughts?