Boring blogger

I realize that at least part of the reason why posts have been sporadic lately is because photography has been sporadic as well. I keep thinking that I'll wait to post until I've taken some pictures to share, but I'm not taking any pictures at all. Mostly I'm running from the moment I leave the house at 7:15 until the moment I get home at oh-my-goodness o'clock, when it's dark (not that I have to get home that late in order to come home in the dark, but you get the idea). None of that is conducive to photography. And, quite frankly, I've been knitting and knitting and knitting on Elektra Redux (and am currently the better part of the way through sleeve two, in case you're keeping track), which isn't that interesting to blog about anyway, since you've already seen the whole process. I am looking forward to knitting something else, although I'm starting to wonder if I'll know how to knit anything but garter stitch when this is over.

I have a slate of projects lined up, including the socks for my niece that I mentioned last time. I also would like to finish Rick's socks. I think that those two pairs might be my conference and travel to Philadelphia knitting. (BTW, how do people from Philadelphia feel about other people calling their city "Philly"? I realized that I do it myself, but knowing how people from the city -- that would be San Francisco, of course, are there any other cities? heh -- feel about "Frisco" or "San Fran", it occurred to me that I probably ought to ask...) I have another small unbloggable project coming up, but I think I'll probably be working on that next week. That will be the Thanksgiving trip to Sacramento knitting (that is, it will be once I've finished Elektra). I also would really love to knit these up for the girls; we have a long tradition of giving them pjs on Christmas eve, and slippers seem like they'd be the perfect go-along. I don't know how realistic that is, but I did get the yarn for them while I was at Yarning For You yesterday, so I'll be knitting them at some point. (I also got myself some laceweight cashmere/silk, oops, but we're not talking about that right now...)

Older Daughter has an orchestra concert tonight (adding to the scheduling insanity of our days, but very exciting as the orchestra has progressed amazingly since her first concert last year!), and I think that I'll be able to knit Elektra during that (if I can keep track of colors and balls of yarn in the dark), so maybe that sleeve will get finished in time for me to get some seaming help before we hit the road on Saturday morning? It's a race to the finish, with mattress stitch on the line; exciting times...

So it's really not that I'm not knitting and thinking about knitting, it's just that I'm not blogging much about it. So I'll leave you with a teaching moment story instead. The other day in class the topic of Easter came up, and someone asked what was up with the bunnies and eggs and things, how do they fit in to the whole Easter story? And I pointed out that they are an overlay from other traditions, because they fit in with the theme of new life, but the bunnies and eggs come from traditions that more explicitly connected to the whole fertility side of new life (oversimplifying a little, but it was an off-topic question). You know, I said, rabbits being fertile animals and all. And, I said, if you think about eggs, there they are, this little white rock-like thing, and then poof! they crack open and you've got a chick.

As I uttered the word "chick", one student sitting in front of me got the most amazing look of dawning enlighenment on his face. I could practically see the lightbulb going off. So I gave him the quizzical teacher look (you know, the one that says, yes? would you like to share?). I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what he said.

"I always thought that it was the bunnies who laid the eggs!"

I went straight home and made absolutely sure that the girls knew that mammals (barring the platypus and echidna, I was careful to add) do not, I repeat do not, lay eggs.

Seriously? Where did *this* week go?

I have got to pull my blogging schedule together! Right now, my work schedule is pretty crazy; once I get to campus, I'm in either meetings or classes all day long. So the one day I work at home is the day that I need to get grading done. And by the end of each day, I'm ready to fall over, and I just don't seem to have any more words left in me. I keep thinking that if I can just get past the next deadline, things will open up a little bit, but something always gets tagged on to the end. At this point in my mental calculations, I figure if I can just make it until mid-February (when the last of my current deadlines will come along), then I can take a little break. (Laugh with me now, people, laugh with me now.)

However, knitting does continue. I finished the first sleeve of Elektra last night and attached it to the back. One more sleeve, and then it's just the two fronts, and if I remember correctly from last time, those go quickly. Still no pictures, but progress is being made. If I can get the second sleeve done before the end of the week, I may take it in to my beloved LYS and ask for some help with the whole mattress stitch thing. I know it's supposed to be easy but honestly, I just can't seem to make mine turn out the way I know it's supposed to. And I think I've decided that it's silly to keep banging my head against that particular wall when I can go and ask for advice from Carol, finisher of garments par excellance (no fears, Carol, I'm just asking for advice; I'll do the actual work myself, I promise!). I only wish I knew as many ways to put a garment together as Carol does (and herein lies the reason why I knit so many shawls, socks, and scarves: no seams!).

I'm also contemplating whether and how much holiday knitting I'm going to do this year. The list keeps getting smaller and smaller. I'm down to between one and three gifts, with a strong leaning towards the "one" side of things. It feels selfish, but given that I'm going to be out of town for the next five weekends, with somewhere close to 2,000 miles of driving and a trip across the country and a conference paper presentation included in all of that, I think I need to make some sanity-preserving decisions here (let's not mention all of the grading that's about to come my way; talk about chickens coming home to roost!)(and who assigned all of these papers, you may ask? I'll never tell). As for the one present I really want to knit, though, I've already bought the yarn.
It's a ball of the tweedy Zauerball (am I spelling that right)? I absolutely adore the colors, and I'll be using this to knit socks for someone else I absolutely adore: my niece. She's the only niece I've got, and it came to my attention that she has no handknit socks (she's not deprived of handknits, mind you; she has a gorgeous poncho that both of my girls developed quite the lustful relationship with while we were in Cincinnati). So it's my hope that I'll get a pair of socks knitted up out of this before the holidays, but if I don't get done in time, that's OK. There's always Martin Luther King Jr Day presents to be distributed in mid-January, right?

All right. That's the quick update. I'm off in twenty minutes to drive to Bakersfield and Tehachapi for work this weekend. I'd better go pack!

A good weekend

Thank you all for the winning wishes for the girls, and for the cheers. (I particularly liked the cheer: Run, feet, run! I used it all day on Saturday, so thank you.) We started our day on Saturday at 7:30 in the morning at Older Daughter's game, and ended it at 8:30 that night when Younger Daughter finally finished her last game and signed her teammates' jerseys. They both played hard, and we cheered hard, but neither of them made it to the semi-finals. It was a real disappointment to Older Daughter in particular, as she's worked hard this year, and gotten a lot better at her position.
I think that Sunday morning, though (when at 8:30, we were at home in our jammies, Rick and I drinking coffee from real mugs and the girls making pancakes, instead of sitting on a cold soccer field), took some of the sting out of it. I was proud of them; they played hard, and they both learned a lot this season (and neither of them would ever think of playing like this; you should check out that footage if you get a chance -- anyone who says that women don't get physical or rough hasn't watched women's soccer). I actually think that both of them did some of their best playing in these last games, which is how a season should end.
I knitted. A lot. It helps to keep me from turning into some kind of psycho mom, yelling at the ref (or the girls who get a bit free with the ol' elbows) from the sidelines. I have encountered a number of parents (and several coaches) who really ought to learn how to knit in order to work out some of their control issues in a more socially acceptable format. They yelled and hollered (and one parent almost got asked to leave the game), and one coach was so frustrated that he kicked a ball behind him in a fit of pique and nailed one of our team's players with it as she was sitting on the sideline (not our coach -- he was awesome); I finished the back of the new version of Elektra instead, which seems much more productive to me.
I reworked the colors (I don't have a picture for you right now, as it's night, and the colors just don't turn out well in the dark), and I am so much happier with them, I can't tell you. Now that the ripping is over, the reworking is making me very happy, which I suppose means that a) I did the right thing in ripping it out (as if we didn't all know that), b) that this yarn is absolutely fabulous, the colors and the way it feels are just about as happy as it gets, and c) that I am still feeling so overwhelmed with the rest of my life that knitting garter stitch continues to be a really good thing. I'm on my way with the first sleeve, I have a plan for the colors that I think will work with the amount of yarn I have left, and I have high hopes of finishing this reknit in a reasonable amount of time.

But tonight, I'm taking Older Daughter to her first real (e.g. not for kids) yoga class. She's been asking for ages, and now that soccer season is over, it seems like the right time both for her and for me. Given how much reworking of what my body knows about yoga I need to do to be able to practice again after the back surgery, she and I will both be perfectly placed in a yoga basics class.

How did it get to be Friday?

I swear we just got home from Cincinnati. How did Friday get here so quickly?

We had a wonderful weekend. It was so nice to get to spend time with our family, I just wish we could have stayed longer. We ate like royalty; my SIL is an amazing cook (pulled pork, mmm...) and made the kinds of things that I never make for myself (far too lazy), and I enjoyed every bite, plus a few I probably shouldn't have. She's a knitter, too, so we got to sit and knit and visit and watch our three girls play together, all of which was such a treat; they had a fabulous time, too, as you can see. Those three get along like a house on fire; it's pretty amazing to watch them when they get together. And my neice and Younger Daughter are two peas in a pod; both of them are active and incessent fantasists -- the ongoing story lines they have running in their heads are amazing, and when you put the two of them together, well! Let the good times roll.
(Note: These pictures are thieved from my lovely sister-in-law, who is far better with a camera than I'll ever be. Thanks, Geri!) We went for a couple of lovely walks, and I got to crunch my way through fallen leaves to my heart's content, as did the girls.
Pumpkins were carved.
The house was decorated.
And the girls got as much candy as any child could want, and more. It was a perfect weekend, and the only thing that would have made it better is if it could have lasted longer. But (as I reminded myself more than once as we worked our way home on Monday) something is much much better than nothing. Especially a something that was this much fun. We've just got to start saving up our miles at a faster rate somehow...

I did knit, as I said. And I finished one unbloggable project, which just needs to block. I also got Rick's socks further along, and am now nearly ready to turn the second heel. These poor socks are getting really short shrift, since they're my very plain meeting knitting and I don't pull them out for anything else. That would be fine and I'd normally make plenty of progress, especially given the number of meetings I've been attending lately (!), but Elektra is also plain and has taken up much of my meeting time, so the socks languish. I also wound up yarn and cast on for the Traveler Socks from Janel Laidman's new book, and then realized a) that I hadn't brought along a second set of dpns to knit the pocket and b) that the construction of the pocket necessitates three layers of knitted fabric on the side of the sock. I can see why (I spent a not-insignificant part of the quiet moments of my weekend attempting to think of alternate ways to knit the sock such that the pocket would only be two-layered, to no avail), but I'm not sure how I feel about those three layers of knitted fabric on the side of my leg, so I stalled out.

Taking a break from Elektra proved to be heartening, and on Tuesday night I commenced the frogging process. I completed it last night, and this is the current state of affairs.
Lots and lots of little balls. The whole frogging process took a little over six hours, and yes, the unpicking of all of the woven-in ends was just as bad as I'd thought it would be. The one silver lining to that particular cloud is my new-found appreciation for the durability of the woven-in end. Folks, those babies ain't going nowhere, no how, no way. (And no, four negatives do not make a positive.) I will never again fear that all of the ends of one of my sweaters are going to simultaneously spring forth at once, leaving me standing in a heap of unravelled yarn at some crucial and public moment.

I actually cast on for the back (again) before I finished frogging, just so I could see how badly trashed the yarn was going to be before I committed to ripping the whole thing. I think it's going to block out reasonably well.
If you embiggen, you can see that the stitches are much more uneven than they were before, but I think a good soak will take care of that. I have also rejiggered the row counts for each color to take care of those giant swathes of brown that were giving me fits, so all in all, I'm expecting much better things of Elektra Redux.

I'm also expecting to be able to make some serious progress this weekend, since it's going to be all soccer, all the time. It's playoffs, so we'll be at Older Daughter's three playoff games from before 8:00 tomorrow morning until about 11:30, and then at Younger Daughter's four playoff games from 1:45 until about 8:00 tomorrow night (!!). Depending on the results of those, there will be further eliminations and the final game on Sunday. This giant stretch of knitting time was one of the reasons why I wanted to get Elektra frogged sooner rather than later, since it's perfect knitting for watching something else. If you are of a mind, you could send some goal-oriented thoughts our way; the girls could use the extra energy for all of that playing, I'm sure!

Stalled

That's what I appear to have done -- completely stalled out. I hauled the jacket in to work on Monday, to share with a friend there who's also a knitter. The nice thing about showing it to her was that it validated both my knowledge (and it is definitely knowledge) that it's just too big, and my sense that I just don't much like those big swathes of brown. She suggested that I try to sell this one and then buy more yarn to knit another, which would indeed solve the problem of my complete inability to make myself start the frogging process. (She also scared the heck out of me by wondering out loud whether frogging was going to ruin the yarn -- eek! I'm choosing to believe that it won't, but frogging sooner rather than later would probably help to ensure that.) But I just can't imagine asking someone to buy a jacket in a style and colors that they wouldn't choose, so that course is probably out. I've worked out how to include the brown without it being overwhelming, which is a good thing. Now it's sitting on the back of one of my knitting chairs, waiting for me to just suck it up and unweave that first end. I have this sneaking suspicion that it's probably one of those jobs that feels huge and overwhelming in the contemplation stage, but that turns out to be not nearly so bad once it's started. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I haven't been doing any knitting to speak of. I'm not sure how much of that comes from the fact that I feel like if I'm going to be playing with yarn, I really should be frogging that dratted jacket so I can start it again (note, btw, that I'm not dreading the reknitting, only the frogging), and how much of it comes from my general feeling of overwhelmedness these days. I had the sudden and semi-shocking realization the other day that I'm going to be out of town for five of the next six weekends. And the one weekend I'm home is soccer play-offs (all weekend). That was a pretty crazy thing to come to grips with. And in the meantime, I still need to finish up my classes, prepare the talk I'm giving in early December (the last of those trips, and the one for which I wanted, and still want, the Elektra jacket), write letters of rec, etc etc. And Rick's been out of town this week. So each evening, once I'm done with the usual evening stuff, I'm just beat, and all I want to do is to lie down in bed and reread some of my favorite novels (this is a long-standing coping mechanism of mine; if I reread a novel, I don't get nearly so caught up in it and I can put it down -- important when the rest of life is crazy -- and I don't have to put nearly so much mental effort into tracking what's going on; I get to visit with old friends instead, which is a very relaxing feeling when everything else is durm und strang, change and chaos). So that's what I've done. I think there's something to be said for honoring the need to hole up sometimes.

And in the end, that's what this long slide towards winter solstice is, right? A time to reflect, to start gathering up those stored energies for the wait until spring.

My knitting has gotten some use, though. Not only has it finally started to cool down (it was 45 degrees when I left the house this morning, which feels chilly to my unacclimated southern blood), but Younger Daughter had to give a school presentation this week on Edith Nesbitt (her choice). I figured surely Nesbitt wore warm woollen shawls as she sat writing her books, so Younger Daughter got to wear Dovecote for its inaugural trip out into the world.
Since I was on furlough today, and since she asked me if I would, I got to come and see her give her presentation (memorized, three minutes long). She did very well, and only forgot one sentence. I don't usually do so well in my public presentations!
The looks on her face in both of those pictures are classic Younger Daughter (I think if you click, you can embiggen and see what I mean). Heh.

That's about it. We're off to Cincinnati this weekend, where more of my knitting will get a workout. I think that the Urban Aran will be the woolly warm thing of choice for the trip (it's only for the weekend, so I'm trying to keep the packing to a minimum). I have my travel knitting ready to go (a scarf, and Rick's socks, which should get finished soon), and my reading (The Knitter, and the IK holiday issue, not to mention Robert Jordan's latest book); I just need to decide whether I should bring one more skein of yarn and a sock pattern, just in case...

It's a very lovely...

Bathrobe.

Grrr...

It's finished. For the first time. Because it looks like I'll be knitting this one again. Score: one for the sweater, zero for me. I worried about this, and fretted, and told myself that the swatch and my measurements all said that I should knit the medium, and that the garter stitch and the wool content would mitigate against the habits of silk to grow and grow and grow.

Not so much.

See what you think. These pictures aren't to show off the colors or anything. They were taken indoors in a mirror, so they're not good. But I think they give you the idea.
See? Too long, too big (and the sleeves are rolled up there). Not flattering. Here's a side view.
It hits in the worst possible spot. Now, if I pull the collar up and roll it so you can see what a shorter length would look like, we get something more like this.
And this.
(It's still hanging funny in the front, but I think you get the idea.)

Dudes. It's got to be frogged. All the way back to little bitty balls of yarn. I spent some time in bed last night trying to think of ways to salvage any of the pieces, by maybe snipping a bit of yarn and then doing some grafting, but the construction of this jacket -- which is what makes it so cool and drapey and swingy -- means that there's just no way to do that. The worst of it is that I wove in all of the ends, so now I'm going to have to find and unweave them all; luckily, I left little dangly ends on most of them, figuring I'd let all the weaving-in settle down before cutting them all the way back. Unluckily, the way I seamed the sleeves was to use the ends so that I could seam each bit with its own color. (That's actually why I wove the ends in, even though somewhere in the back of my mind I worried that this was going to be the outcome; I needed to see how it fit with the sleeves done, and the weaving-in bit just came with the territory.)(Also, I'll confess here that hope springs eternal, and I was still hoping until around 11:00 last night. Then hope died.)

I might also think about the colors while I frog. I've got lots more yarn that I needed: a whole skein of the dark blue, most of a skein of the brown, and an extra skein each of the green and the handpaint. I'm wondering now about the brown, whether it belongs in this particular jacket or not, so I might think about leaving it out, now that I know I'd have enough of the other three yarns to make up for it (especially knitting it a size smaller).

Thoughts? Opinions? Condolences? Manic laughter? I will take any and all.

Acquisitions

I am so close to being done with Elektra that I can taste it. I only have four more rows on the collar to go, and then I need to mattress stitch the underarm seams, and weave in the ends, and it's done. I should note that as short as that list is, it's going to take longer than it sounds like to complete. First, I have no idea how to mattress stitch anything, let alone a garter stitch seam whose colors change every little while, so that's going to require some studying and figuring. Second, because of all of those color changes, the whole weaving in of ends process is going to take a while. On the bright side, weaving ends into garter stitch is a cakewalk. So, as soon as this post is up, I'm going to start a load of laundry and then settle down with an audiobook and my knitting to wrap this project up. I figure it might be good luck to wear it to the girls' playoffs the weekend after next, as I've spent every single game this season working on this thing. It seems appropriate.

While I don't have any knitting to show off right now, I do have a few acquisitions to share. I have been on a very serious yarn diet, and have been really good about following it (having two sweaters on the needles hasn't hurt), but I will confess that I bought some fiber. Some of you may remember that, quite a while ago when I first bought my Traditional, I bought some lovely Jacob roving at my local farmer's market from Kathy of Rancho Borrego Negro. I spun it up into a two-ply yarn which I have long adored.
It's been in the back of my mind for quite some time now that I'd like to spin myself a sweater's worth of yarn (I have heard again and again that spinning a pound of a particular fiber is a great way to work on consistency and control in spinning), and, given how much fun I had spinning this yarn when I was a rank beginner, and how much I love the results (this yarn has a lovely soft hand), it seemed like it would be a good idea to attempt to get more of it.

Thanks to Kathy's efforts and her willingness to search throughout her storage area, I succeeded.
That's about a pound (probably more, I need to weigh it) of the loveliest Jacob roving you've ever seen. I am really looking forward to spinning it up. It's going to take some work to reproduce the grist of the original yarn, which I like, but the lesson in control will be good for me. I'd very much like to spin it on the Lendrum, but I think I'll need to get more bobbins before I do that; I only have four right now, and I've been told that in order to increase the consistency of the final yarn, the best bet with something like this is to spin all of the singles onto lots of bobbins, and then to switch the bobbins out during the plying. The other option is to spin the singles on one wheel and ply on another, which I may do. We'll see.

I have also acquired further knitting-related reading material.
That magazine is the new British one that I've mentioned before. I like it a lot. It's not cheap. I should probably subscribe, which might save me some money (not to mention the fear that I'll miss one of them at the bookstore, since it's a monthly issue). I love that hat on the front, and there's a sweater in there that I may very well have to knit for myself at some point (although I think I've done enough of that lately; it's time to knit some things for the girls). I haven't dug into the Clara Parkes book yet (The Knitter's Book of Wool), but this is one that I've been waiting for with bated breath ever since I heard it was coming out (there are two fantasy books that I'm waiting for in the same way, but for various reasons, they are not nearly as on time in their publications as this one, alas).

The sock book is by Janel Laidman. It is one of those rare pattern books from which I would gladly knit a vast majority of the patterns. Honestly, I like nearly every single one, which isn't always the case with a book of patterns. But I think I want to knit myself the Traveler Socks first.
I don't know if you can see it in that picture, but there's a pocket in the side of that sock. How cool is that? I must have a pair for my very own self. Both of the girls have already found the book and picked out socks for themselves, too, so I guess I'd better get busy knitting.