Apple of My Eye (Candy Friday)

Photo taken last Saturday.  After an intervening week of gloom and rain and snow,  it looks like this again today, with a sunny October-blue sky.

Mmmm, fresh crisp apples!  One of the best things about autumn here.

Weekend Update with hints o’ Sun(flower)

Unfortunately without shawl progress photos: I haven’t gotten the Girasole all spread out to take an up-to-date photo.  But I am knitting on the edging as of late last week!  That’s the good news.

The bad news: 640 stitches per row; each stitch to bind off equals TWO  rows of the lace edging, though short rows and pretty simple garter lace.  Still.  I was thinking 640 rows, and when I realized it was 1280 rows, it made sense why progress was so slow.  (Each lace pattern repeat is less than 0.5% of the total circumference of the shawl.  Gah.  Maybe I had better stop calculating right now.)

When I have more bound off, I should be able to photograph it (right now it’s all bunched up on the needles) and of course soon there should be a blocking shot of the Golden Girasole!  In the meantime, there was a bit of sunshine to knit by this past weekend, just as I wished for last week.

Saturday’s Sky, a neighbor’s sugar maple tree:

and again:

I admit, I didn’t specify anything as far as wishes for temperature.  With the result being temperatures 20 degrees below normal.  Oh, well, at least we didn’t get more than a trace of snow before the clear-and-cold….

(No, the snow waited for TODAY.)

Despite the cold, I had visitors from the Twin Cities yesterday, just coming to see the area, tour around, hang out for a bit!  We went to Salem Stitchery & Knittery (formerly Country Woolgatherer) where Tammy was having a fall Open House and sale; and then had a nice drive around the orchards and Grandad’s Bluff.

Nicole, Jonelle and Becca.  Above, outside Salem Stitchery; below, Nicole perusing lovely yarn inside.

Oohing and Aahing about the Mississippi River Valley from the Minnesota side. 

Though we had to watch out for the herds of lawn deer roaming La Crescent.

We even saw an eagle on top of Grandad’s Bluff!

Look!!

Rainy Day Artwork

Thanks for all the nice comments about the autumn morning sun photo I posted last Friday!  It was one of those moments that was almost magical, the way the sun shone through the dewy grass seedheads.  I tried hard to capture it….I’m sure my neighbors were wondering about me, as I laid down in the middle of the back yard dew to take the picture, when I should have been on my way to work.  But I wasn’t sure the photo did the moment justice.  Apparently you saw something of what I saw, though.  I’m glad!

 

Here’s the opposite, today.  I showed you a rainy day dusk as an aside last Saturday.  It didn’t even look that nice in real life, mostly just grey.  

But look now.

It’s much prettier after I Photoshopped it as colored pencil art and without the power lines!

(Click if you’d like to see it bigger.)

Definitely prettier as art.  The fall rain pattern is currently in effect….

I’m ready for a few October blue sky days now!

A Tale of Two Sunflowers

On the quick trip up to the Twin Cities that I showed you the other week, I got some car knitting done of a project I started right before our Family Camp vacation (and worked on at camp).

Here it is at camp, not too far into it.  This is the lovely Girasole by Jared Flood.  I’m knitting it here in  mmmMalabrigo Sock from The Loopy Ewe in the colorway Ochre (it looked somewhat Sunflower-ish to me — that’s what Girasole means).   I have some thoughts of lightly overdyeing the edges and center with brown, subtly; we’ll see.  My nerve may fail me.

Though I’m also working on a Seekrit Project or two or three, I had been working on this on and off and making progress (when I wasn’t misplacing my second and third skeins of yarn).  Here it is after the Twin Cities trip.

It’s such a pretty pattern! And the yarn is lovely to work with.

This project is not destined for anyone or anything in particular at this point, I’m just knitting it for fun and because there is a Loopy Ewe KAL (knitalong) going on.

But as I knit, and as I petted an amazing skein of yarn I have from my favorite hand-dyed yarn purveyor, Twisted Fiber Art,  I had an idea of knitting this lace project in that colorway and dyeing style (Ember Evolutions).  And I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Lucky, lucky me.  Shortly thereafter, my number came up to be a ‘custom’ customer at Twisted. You can sign up and in turn, eventually, you get the chance to have essentially free run of the store and order any yarn you want in any quantity you want.  This was not a quantity or kind of yarn I would normally be able to get in an update, even if I got lucky.  Plus, I was probably going to want a coordinating yarn dyed at the same time to do the edging, and that yarn base wasn’t even offered in the coordinating yarn.  But as a Custom customer….the world was my oyster!

So I took the plunge and ordered the yarn for Girasole in Ember, in the Muse yarn (a merino/silk light sportweight yarn, lovely!), with coordinating yarn for the edging in the greyish part of the colorway.

It came the other day.  The picture doesn’t do it justice, but I tried.

Ember Evolution and Sky

I had a weak moment and I cast on for the second Girasole just to see how it would start to look.

(And then I stopped.  Can’t wait to get back to it, though.)

Granted, it doesn’t look a lot like this real-life sunflower from my front yard:

(On a sunnier Saturday than today…  )

But I think it will be a gorgeous fantastical Girasole, when it’s done!

Summertime

…and the livin’ is busy, apparently.  (Hey!  That’s not how the song goes!)

Sorry to worry those who were concerned about my whereabouts!  Just working a lot, traveling some, a little bit of illness at the house, nothing too remarkable.  But not much blogging (I am very behind on reading blogs too).

I even missed taking a Saturday Sky picture one weekend!  (Gasp.)  Granted, I worked, but I did see the sky at one point.

But here’s a quick synopsis of Saturday Skies so as to catch you up on the last month. (Oops.  A month. Wow.)

This past weekend, I worked, but it was a lovely summer weekend; not hot enough for my kids, but I liked it.  We could use rain, but still, one has to enjoy wonderful summer days when they come and when one can.

Above is the sunset lighting up my front yard Japanese maple.  It glows like an ember when the light shines through it.  So beautiful.  It’s a slightly hardier cultivar that has survived our past winter with -22 degree F temps, which I found at a local nursery: Acer palmatum “Emperor”, by Monrovia.  It is  slower growing in these conditions and won’t get big, but it’s done very well in its west-facing (as you can see) location.

Last week we were among very different trees and skies:

Can you see the ‘different’ trees?  How about now?

Yes, there are no palm trees in Wisconsin.

I and my daughters were enjoying 95 degree F heat and high humidity plus daily scattered thunderstorms in Orlando, Florida, where I had a meeting and the girls were tagging along to swim at the hotel pool (and go to Disney) while our husband and father was on a church trip to equally hot and humid New Orleans (granted, he was working harder than we were).

While in Florida, we also visited New York,

San Francisco,

and Nepal.

(We get around.)

Before that, in July, I worked…and forgot to take a photo one Saturday.

Another Saturday, it was apparently a nice day.

I think I worked.

And that brings us back to the last day I posted, the Fourth of July!

Here’s another picture from that evening: the Mississippi River at sunset, with boats awaiting the start of the Independence Day fireworks.  (Which were great.)

There has been knitting, of course.  I’ve been plugging away on my Monkey Kaw Kaw socks (here before I turned the heels, the which is now done), and I finished a project I’ve been working on for two years, but there is an entire tale attached to it, so that will await another post.  I finished another pair of socks after the DC trip, with my favorite Twisted yarn.

(Playful yarn base, Scorched colorway, my own design, though there are similar ones around, I have found now.)

I knit a scarf all over Walt Disney World, shortly to be finished, and a baby hat was started while I had a root canal a couple weeks ago, and the hat finished two days later.  (It was my stress relief in The Chair.)  I am no doubt forgetting things, due to lack of blog maintenance….though I haven’t been keeping up as well on Ravelry either.  More knitting to come!

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This coming weekend, we leave for our annual Family Camp vacation.  So I won’t be suddenly catching up on blogging then, needless to say.  But I’ll try hard to pop in before we leave.  Fear not!  I’m back!

Fourth of July Saturday Sky

As of an hour ago.  A perfect night for fireworks over the Mississippi River.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Knitting Blog? Well, yes

Based on the last month, casual droppers-by would be excused for having no idea that this was nominally a knitting blog.  (Or an active blog at all — thanks to my friends who checked up on me!  Yes, all is well.)

You’d think it was all flowers and Saturday Skies, like this Saturday Sky from two weeks ago a month ago,  from the top of the Washington Monument.

(click to embiggen if you wish!)

But I have been knitting, truly!  Just traveling and working a lot also, which leaves little time to blog about it.

I’m not going to catch up with all the knitting I’ve done all at once, but let me show you today what I actually finished while on the Washington DC 5th grade trip.  While on the bus, even! For my younger daughter, The Gothlet, who is 11:

Gothlet Gauntlets!

Even though it wasn’t cold when I finished weaving in the last end and gave them to her, the gauntlets were immediately put on.  I think she liked them….!

These were made from amazing GothSocks self-striping yarn from Rainy Days & Wooly Dogs (etsy shop at the link; there’s an update next week!).  This colorway was  ‘Little Goth Girl’, and how perfect for my Gothlet?  As I told you before, I bought this at Madrona, from the dyer, who was very kind in skeining up some more yarn she had at home, and bringing it in for me to choose from  (which I happily did).  As I may have mentioned before, I designed these in such a way that they will fit my daughter now (she’s skinny, being a picky eater) and in the future (she’s shooting up like the proverbial weed).

I did this by shaping the arm part of the gauntlet, to hug the arm, but also by putting in ribbing on the undersurface to draw the gauntlet to the arm now, and also in the future.  I used k2 p2 ribbing, which is the most resilient I know. Below is the back side and the front, when I had just started the hand portion with thumb gusset.

Here I am above, demonstrating that the gauntlet fits an adult!  And I am of average height and at least average weight, though perhaps my wrists are a bit on the bony side.

Back to the happy Gothlet.

I’ll write this up formally when I can, but in the meantime, I wanted to give a quick and dirty version for anyone who might want to knit something similar, because it really did work out well.

First of all, I knit this a touch loosely at least on the hand: I usually knit socks on 0s, sometimes 1s for thicker fingering weight.  I knit these mitts for a skinny 11-year-old on US size 1s (2.25 mm) for the ribbing, and size “1.5″s (2.5 mm) for the arm, then size US size 2s (size 2.75 mm) for the main part of the hand (because I didn’t put any ribbing on the palm, reasoning that it would bug me a bit to have that texture there, but still wanted this to fit in the future when she’s bigger; and for the looks part of the gauntlet, a little looser there was OK).

If I were knitting this for me, I’d probably go with 2s all the way. The ribbing makes it fit snugly, but I’d rather have the knitting flexible more than dense, on these, which are not by their very nature designed for wearing outdoors in a midwestern January, for example.

If you needed to fit this to a different size arm, I’d suggest looking at your gauge (mine was 7 stitches/inch on 2s) and the measurement of the forearm at its widest, and casting on stitches in a multiple of 4 to equal that measurement or slightly less.  But I would still decrease to the same number of stitches for the hand (48) because that fits pretty much anyone of adult or near-adult size.

One last note:  In this self-striping yarn, I took a trick from Meg Swansen, and every time the color changed in the ribbing, I KNIT every stitch of the first row of different color instead of knitting in pattern.  This makes the stripes very crisp, without the ‘ticking’ effect in the purl stitches.  It’s a cool trick!  Not essential, but I like it.

Without further ado, here’s the quick and dirty directions for the Gothlet Gauntlets:

Cast on 64 stitches loosely (I used the German Twisted Cast-on).  Consider using 1-2 sizes bigger needles than you might normally use for socks, for ‘give’ and comfort (you don’t need hard wear here, and you want flexibility in the upper arm).  Use method of choice (two circs, dpns, Magic Loop).

Knit 12 rows in k2 p2 ribbing.

Mark beginning of row with stitch marker.  Knit 38 then place stitch marker, k1, [p2, k2] four times, p2, k1, place marker, knit 6.

Knit approximately 1 1/2 inches (4 cm) in pattern as established (knit to marker, k1, [p2, k2] four times, p2, k1, slip marker, knit to end of row).

Begin decreases: Knit to two stitches before marker.  SSK (slip as if to knit, slip as if to knit, knit two slipped stitches together).  Slip marker.  Work stitches between markers in rib pattern as established. K2tog (knit two together).  Knit to end of row.

Knit next 7 rows in pattern as established (knit to marker, work in rib pattern between markers, knit to end of row).

Decrease as above on 8th row.

Continue decreasing every 8th row until you have decreased 8 times, down to a total of 48 stitches.  You will have had to shift stitches on your needles to do the last few decreases, unless you Magic Loop, possibly.  This is all right!

Knit in pattern as established until gauntlet is desired length to wrist. Then knit a row in all stockinette (knit every stitch), removing markers as you come to them, and dividing the stitches evenly between  needles (24 stitches front and back, with ribbing centered on the back: 3 knit stitches, 18 stitches of p2 k2 ribbing, 3 knit stitches).

NOW: (here’s where it gets a bit sketchier)

Follow the directions for the Fingerless Piano Mitts and Mini-Mitts on this blog, but plug in the correct numbers for this size:

starting with 48 stitches instead of 40.

For RIGHT gauntlet, knit 28, place marker for thumb gusset, k4, place marker, knit to end of round (16 st).  Then follow instructions until dividing stitches for thumb gusset.  For LEFT gauntlet, knit 40, place marker, knit 4, place marker, knit to end of row (4 st).  Then follow instructions until dividing stitches for thumb gusset.  At end of increases, you will have 64 stitches (again!) on the needles.  You may need to knit more plain rounds to make the gauntlet the correct length to reach to the crotch of the thumb.

At thumb gusset, after putting the thumb gusset stitches on a holder of spare yarn, and after casting on 4 stitches, you will have 52 stitches total.  The rest is as written.  Feel free to adjust the length of the stockinette and ribbing to desired length.  The thumb instructions are also as written.

*someday I’ll get this written up all formal-like.  But I thought I’d get the bare bones version out there, because I’ve been asked!

Here, in other news:  Saturday Skies of the last month, since DC.

More knitting, more flowers, more Saturday Skies to come!

Saturday Skies In Arrears

Whirlwind tour of the last month as seen in Saturday Skies:

This Saturday just past was gray and cooler, but finally in the last few days I have seen incontrovertible signs of spring.

Buds on my mother-in-law Helen’s crabapple tree, among other signs.  Yes!

The  Saturday before, we (the family) were taking the train to Chicago for a special outing.  The girls had never been on the train before.  The RockStar, who was unconvinced beforehand, has declared it the only way to travel now!

Archetypal Chicago Skyscraper cityscape view upon arriving last Saturday:

(did you see the plane with contrail?)

and the sky behind Navy Pier on an early evening expedition:

Going backwards in time:

The previous Saturday was the day I was supposed to leave Seattle (um, yeah.  More about that later).  A lot of moving from place to place that day, so multiple Saturday Sky pictures, actually.

Saturday Sky as seen from the Kingston-Edmonds Ferry, leaving Port Ludlow and Sock Camp: with another ferry in the picture,

and without.

I caught an airplane going overhead from the ferry also.

Later in the day,  Saturday Sky behind the EMP (Experience Music Project/SciFi Museum) and the Space Needle.

(You can see it was a gorgeous day in the Seattle area!  Of course: it was the day I was (supposed to be) leaving….)

Then, at my friend Astrid’s house:

No,  the spider’s not on your screen, nor was it in Astrid’s and Greg’s house, but on the outside of the porch sliding door!  Here’s a prettier view sans arachnid….beautiful lakeside sunset in a safe harbor on the shore of Martha Lake.

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A week before, I got on the train in the evening to leave for Sock Camp, after a very busy day.  So the only picture I have of the Saturday Sky is a blurry twilight picture from the moving train, as we crossed over the Mississippi just after leaving the station.

Oh, and a picture of black almost-midnight sky over a different Mississippi River Bridge as we went through Minneapolis, a few hours later.

Yes, it’s been an eventful set of Saturdays!  Sorry to keep teasing about Sock Camp….despite kmkat’s valiant efforts to persuade my work to ‘let her knitter go’, it was another busy weekend.  Besides which, I took over 1000 pictures at Sock Camp and on the train.  And, frankly, condensing does not come naturally to me:  I want to show you ALL the best pictures and tell you EVERYTHING!  But that would take a very long time.

If you come over and knit sometime, and want to see, I’ll show and tell you everything.  In the meantime, I’ll work on the Reader’s Digest version.  (Before I leave again on Thursday….)

Saturday Sky Sandwich (knitting in the middle)

I took a whole bunch of Saturday Sky pictures the Saturday before last; it was just that kind of day, even though busy.  Last Saturday, not so much.  But the two together: a good exploration of color in nature. Sounds like my camp homework!

Last Saturday WAS a beautiful day (though I missed the sunset by being at a Celtic music concert, the Boys of the Lough).

And the lilac buds thought so too.

Look how the different shades of blue give the sky depth.

The weekend before last’s Saturday Skies:

when I got home from work:

and later, when I prepared to leave (late) for the Twin Cities, to go to the Bohus exhibit I told you about, the next day.

The sun was setting as I crossed the bridge across the Mississippi River into Minnesota.

But I had to stop and get out of the car as I drove through the Mississippi River backwaters in the area between Wisconsin and Minnesota; it was so gorgeous.

The ice was leaving the river and the backwaters.

There were so many birds!  Geese, many geese,

but I also saw flocks of seagulls, solitary hawks, an eagle, tiny birds.  And can you see the red-winged blackbird back in his perch on the edge of the marsh?

He’s in the tallest tree.  Here’s another one, below.

However, the night was definitely falling, and I had to hurry on my way

Only to stop one more time at that incredible silhouette of the Minnesota plains farm against the dying sunset, that I showed you last Friday; another, closer, view:

Then darkness fell….

The next day, in addition to the Monkey socks I showed you, and the Gothlet’s gauntlets, I also had with me a new project, my first Baby Surprise Jacket.  (I’m certainly jumping on all sorts of bandwagons now, aren’t I?  How many years behind the times?

Here it is as of last week, posing on the car hood like the Monkeys did.

This is a combination of some mill end Socks That Rock heavyweight — I’m not sure if it’s undyed or if it’s a Spirit colorway that’s so faint, I can’t see a color — and the Twisted Duchess in Rodney that I showed you earlier as a cardigan and frogged.  I’m liking it in this combination.  Sadly, it no longer looks like this:  I had to frog it.  I can even see the mistake in this picture — now that I know what I did.  In this pattern, you increase after 5 garter ridges, on the short ends.  I did it on one end, but not the other.  The far end doesn’t look shorter just because of perspective; it really is shorter!  Unfortunately, because the pattern is mindless knitting after that row until row 44, I didn’t figure out my mistake until row 44.  Dummy me.

Well, that let me change the placement of the color band, anyway; I decided to move it up a little.  And I could have woven in the carried yarn a little better.  So it’s OK.  But it was a fair amount of frogging….I’m just now to the color band again.

And the coworker for whose baby I’m making this went and had her baby early, then, in the meantime!  (Not excessively early, just definitely before her due date.) So I didn’t get it done to give her in the hospital, obviously.  Since it’s going to be probably a 12 month size or so (and he’s a very average little guy), I will slack off my rush on this, I guess.  It’s good meditative knitting.

So, the other knitting-related part for the center of this Blog Sandwich is a follow-up to the Knit-Out also.  The day after the Knit-Out, I got an email saying that I had won a door prize, donated by the Minnesota Knitters’ Guild.  Since I wasn’t local, they were willing to mail it to me (though the American Swedish Institute didn’t actually tell me what it was).  The package came at the end of the week, and it was so cool!

A sturdy knitting bag, with all sorts of cool pockets,

And a great knitting notebook.

Anyway, after leaving the event that I won the above at, though I knew it yet not, I drove back down, this time along the Mississippi and stopped once for a couple more pictures, though it was no longer Saturday and the light was failing:

(the Mississippi at Lake City, where it widens)

Thus ended a wonderful knitting (and photography) weekend!

So: many lovely shades of blue above: but there are so many more; an almost infinite series just in the Saturday Skies I’ve photographed.  Thus I decided to make a mosaic out of all the Saturday Skies I had photographed, since I started doing so in 2007.  I had to winnow it down to 36 photos, though, for the mosaic.  So I eliminated all the photos that had significant non-sky content.  And all the sunsets and sunrises, as this is a blue-gray nature study.

After ruthless pruning, here is my Saturday Sky photomosaic:

1. Lilac-buds-in-the-Saturday-, 2. geese-in-the-Saturday-Sky, 3. snowy-sunset-Saturday-Sky-F, 4. Saturday-Sky-with-small-pla, 5. Saturday-Sky-with-Scandinav, 6. west-wind-and-power-lines, 7. Saturday-Sunset-jan-24, 8. Saturday-Sky-December-20-20, 9. foggy-october-4-morning, 10. field-outside-Viroqua-in-Oc, 11. Saturday-Sky-over-McCormick, 12. Saturday-Sky-Sept-13, 13. Saturday Sky over Noah’s Ark August 30, 14. Saturday Sky August 30 with Spring Forward Socks, 15. Saturday Sky August 30 on a hot August afternoon, 16. Saturday Sky August 16, 17. Saturday Sky over Little Boy Lake August 9, 18. really blue Saturday Sky August 9, 19. hazy Saturday Sky over Lake Monona, 20. oil painting clouds, 21. Saturday Sky with flag and crane, 22. Saturday sky June 21st 2008, 23. 20080415_365, 24. Apple blossoms against a Saturday Sky, 25. Sun halo, 26. saturday sky april 5 2008, 27. Saturday Sky through Frost, 28. snow in the afternoon, 29. saturday sky with tree and crane, 30. Saturday Sky with Crane, 31. saturday sky with maple, 32. Saturday Sky with falling leaves, 33. saturday sky oct 27, 34. Saturday sky for the parade, 35. Saturday Sky November 24, 36. Saturday morning sky with morning star

(Made with kd’s mosaic maker)

I love how, as I said above, the blues and even the grays always have shading.  I think that’s one of the characteristics of color in nature, but especially of color suffused by light, as the sky is.  None of these are an even, flat, smooth blue or gray; there is always a gradation.

Must be why I prefer hand-dyed yarns, even in solids.  Flat seems boring now (I’m spoiled); subtle tone-on-tone adds depth and light and interest. Hmm?

Spring Tease Saturday

The robins all suddenly appeared today.

Saturday Sky with Robin on Roof.

They all decided at once that it was time to join their foolish, if hardy, robin buddies who spent the winter up North (and what a winter to decide to do that, hmm?).

There was another sign of spring, if I looked closely:

Buds on the neighbor’s lilac bushes!

No crocuses yet, and no other buds that I can really see.

A sullenly cold and cloudy day, that started out below freezing

ended with a lovely sunset.

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I’m just putting my fingers in my ears and pretending I didn’t hear the forecast for 2-4 inches of snow tomorrow.  Lalalalala!