Finding my stride

It's Sunday, and I'm posting.  I think I'm starting to get back into some kind of rhythm (I'm not saying what kind of rhythm exactly).  I am knitting, I am posting.  Laundry is done, the house has been vacuumed, and there are plans for dinner (for which the food is in the house, even). 

We won't talk about the ever-expanding work to-do list, though.  (I got myself a very cool calendar program for my phone which includes a combined to-do list - it even lets me check things off when I get them done, which I find satisfying.  This is really nice on many levels, but on Friday, I changed the "due" date on something like eleven items to Monday.  This is the electronic version of the little post-it to-do list I used to keep in my paper calendar; I kept it on a post-it note so I could move it forward at the end of each week when it wasn't done.  I'm not sure if the fact that I know it won't get done and plan for it speaks of maturity and organization or the exact opposite.)

This week, a couple of things finally got finished.  It is nice to be able to see actual finished knitted objects.  The first is something small that I started last Saturday at Yarning For You's big kick-off for this year's Knit for the Cure.

It still needs buttons, but otherwise it's completely done, seams and all.  It's a Baby Surprise Jacket (which I have decided may just become an annual thing; they apparently sell quickly, and I find them entertaining to knit), knitted on size 3 needles out of Baah La Jolla, with matching booties (no pattern - I just wing those).  I'll try to drop it by the store sometime this week (I'm holding off on the buttons to see if they have anything cute there; otherwise I'll dig into Grandmom's button box for something simple - there are enough small white buttons in there to keep me buttoning Baby Surprise Jackets for years to come).

I also finished Scoria.  I started this one as a September KAL with some friends (we're all doing different patterns, so it's a sweater KAL, rather than a particular pattern KAL), and I did actually have all the pieces knitted by the end of the month, as well as a first pass at the seams.  But two of them turned out badly, so yesterday I undid them and re-seamed (one shoulder and the neck), and then reblocked it, which made a huge different.  I am tolerably pleased.

As Rick says, it's not as fitted as some sweaters I've knitted - I think the waist shaping could have been more, well, shapely.  That said, I still love the parts of this sweater that made me want to knit it in the first place.  The combination of the herringbone pattern and the lace:

 

And the neck:

It's a very well-written pattern, and this yarn, as always, works up beautifully.

To recap, this is the pattern Scoria, from the magazine The Knitter (issue 46).  I knitted the medium on size 3 needles, out of 7 balls of Plymouth Vita (a cotton/cashmere blend).  I think I probably could have knitted the small size (hindsight 20/20), which might have had the added benefit of not giving me fits of nerves over whether I'd have enough yarn (I did, barely).  The happy news is that I dug that yarn out of stash to knit this.  I have been trying to convince myself that for every new thing I start (new in the sense of new pattern or new yarn), I need to work my way through something already cast on, or in stash.  So all in all, a success.  I will wear this - it may even end up being this year's conference sweater.

Keeping in mind that desire to work my way through some languishing projects and languishing yarn, once these were done, I went back and picked up the second pair of Silk Road Socks - it is high time I wrapped those up.  You may remember that I knitted the first pair out of my own pattern, based on a silk woven funerary face covering I saw at an exhibit on textiles from the Silk Road (I saw the exhibit in 2010).  That pair went to Younger Daughter, as they were too small for me.  However, I had plenty of yarn left over, so I set about reworking the pattern to a larger size and knitting them for me.  I had some theory about perhaps entering them into the county fair this past spring, but, as happens, time got away from me and I realized that there was no way I was going to finish the second sock of the pair without making myself very very stressed, and so I set them aside. 

I've been avoiding picking them up again, partly because one of my goals is to write this pattern up, and it's mostly very straightforward, except for the heel turn.  I can describe what to do in an intuitive way that might work for some knitters (it essentially involves turning the heel as one does, using yellow yarn to ssk or p2tog if both stitches are yellow, and blue if both are blue, and if they are different colors, using blue unless that would mean more than three blues in a row), but that kind of description really wouldn't work for some knitters, so I want to work through it this time with my notebook in hand, and to take row-by-row notes.  That's been putting me off.  So I girded my loins and hauled everything out and set back to work.

I am now done with the leg of the second sock, and am working on the heel flap.  I transferred the notes for the pattern to my new knitting notebook (more on that in a moment), and now have some sense of what I already know and what I need to know to write the pattern.  The only question I have for myself is whether I need to knit one more heel turn for the smaller size (in "scratch" yarn, even - and without a sock attached) so that I can write that out row by row as well.  We shall see.

As for that notebook, that's something else I've wanted to post about.  It arrived in the mail from New Zealand, in a little care package from Stella, some time ago, and I've been meaning to share it.  If you don't read her blog, and if you want some inspiration, it is most definitely a place to go.  Not only is she a skilled and veteran knitter and spinner, she is also (among many other things) a lover of fountain pens (a woman after my own heart), and she (fairly) recently learned bookbinding, and has been making lovely books of various sorts, all with fountain-pen-grade paper - and this one has knitter's graph paper on every page.

She bound it so that it will stay open, with plenty of room to add in yarn labels and bits of yarn and swatches and all of the things that make a good knitting notebook.  And she covered it in wonderful paper.

Isn't it lovely?  I have been feeling rather far away, somehow, from my own design work and fooling around (in the creative sense) for the last little while, but this notebook has been rather calling to me to get back to it.  It's hard to ignore that kind of lure, and I'm glad I finally found the time this weekend to breathe a little bit and get my head around this project.  (There's a second project that I hope will get kicked off that's long been on my back burner; more on that in another post.)

And finally, on the subject of inspiration, I have to mention the other impetus I lately had to get back into the more creative side of my knitting.  Ellen and Jan, of Twinset Designs, have begun their own podcast (I think this calls for an exclamation point)!  I was delighted when I found out, and delighted during every second of both of the podcasts they've put out so far, and if you are looking for a new podcast (or if you are new to knitting podcasts and interested in diving in), I highly recommend it.  They are both designers, and prolific knitters - they're also both spinners - and I find that listening to them talk about the way they think about knitting gets my brain moving in interesting ways.  You can find out more about it here. 

And now I think it's time to go contemplate that second project...