Finally free from striped sweater jail

I must preface this post by saying Ash and Turner, I love being able to give dear friends handknits and the all the griping that will follow this disclaimer is mainly for posterity's sake, just in case I ever feel tempted to make my own child a sweater like Alexander's. Which is to say I loved the finished product. It was just the process...















Everyone on Ravelry who noted that this is the most BORING and ETERNAL knit ever is right. I am still trying to figure out why this is the case. In terms of product, the sweater - an online freebie from Drops called b14-27 Jacket - is a clear winner. It is wearable. It is effortlessly unisex. It is adorable. It is not without reason that it's a reasonably popular knit on Ravelry. In terms of process, the sweater has novel, clever construction, being knit sideways from one buttonband to the other, and yet it is simple enough to knit while listening to music, watching movies, etc. It is easily adaptable to a wide range of yarns. It is endlessly customizable. All of these things make it potentially a great knit. And yet...















The pattern is written for alpaca, but I used Zara merino on a size five addi circular. Zara has more stitch definition than alpaca and I think it worked quite well with the pattern. However, the sweater is a huge yarn hog - it consumed nine balls of Zara and is quite heavy as a result. This is not really a problem for a sweater knit for a Canadian baby, but I think the fact that it sucked up yarn and never seemed to grow may have been the reason I felt like I would die before finishing it. It was boring right up until the last green stripe, which is saying something since I had exactly this much green yarn left:

















So broken was I by the end that I didn't even care that it was looking likely that I was going to have to buy more Zara in a no doubt different dye lot. I think maybe I believed that there wasn't enough green yarn left in the world to finish the sweater and it therefore wasn't worth getting upset since I was clearly going to spend the rest of my life and my child's college fund searching for and purchasing ball after ball of green yarn. And when it turned out be just enough green yarn, my immediate thoughts were more along the lines of "Now where are those damn brown buttons...?" rather than any elatedness over having completed the green stripes without having to switch dye lots.















The last third of the sweater was knit over a one and a half day marathon session immediately following the submission of my final grades. I took a good hard look at the sweater and then my belly and realized that if the sweater wasn't finished before my baby came, it was NEVER getting finished. And then I grabbed two seasons of Buffy and sat on the sofa and only got up to pee (a somewhat more frequent occurrence these days) and order food for delivery.















The ends were woven in and the buttons attached sitting in Central Park on a particularly golden day. My brain was possibly not entirely recovered from the marathon knitting session because I sewed on the three buttons and held up the sweater to finally, FINALLY admire the finished product only to realize that I had sewn the buttons on the wrong side of the sweater.

Nooooooo.

But the good thing about knitting is mistakes are always correctable, if not always painless.















The postal service employee I dealt with when I finally got the sweater boxed up and sent to Canada was uncharacteristically spectacularly helpful, so at least the door didn't hit me in the ass on the way out. And it really is a beautiful sweater, and it will look smashing on Alexander, so all is well that FINALLY ends well.

Except in the course of knitting this sweater I have also sadly learned that my love for my unborn child is not quite up to the boundless maternal ideal since I am absolutely certain that I will not suffer this sweater again, even for my own flesh and blood. Oh well. Better to know one's limits sooner rather than later, I guess.

Keys to the Kingdom

These?

















These would be the keys to our new apartment. Our new apartment that is twice as big as our current apartment. Our new apartment with laundry in the building. Our new apartment that is located in our current beloved neighborhood. Yes.

Now all it needs to do is pass the $325 bedbug sniffing beagle test before we move in. The apartment checked out fine on the bedbug registry, but in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth about a million tons of cure. Landlords are legally obligated to pay for bedbug extermination, so on the off chance that - god forbid - the apartment is infested, at least we'll have some legal protection and some time to kill the bastards before we move in. And by "bastards" I of course mean the bedbugs, not the landlord or the realtor or anything like that.

But the main thing is, we have the keys. The story of how we got them will have to wait until I have recovered from the process of getting them, but believe me, it's a fine tale, and exceptional even by New York real estate standards.

Keep yer illiterate hands offa me

Possibly it's just the third trimester rage talking, or maybe I just really miss grading papers, but this pamphlet copy - extracted from a larger collection of advertisements dumped in my lap on the first day of my $300-ish "natural childbirth" class - made me particularly happy that we own a paper shredder:

Motherhood is wonderful but we often underestimate the physical demands of being a mother. Dr. Knitcrit says: Awkward, redundant sentence structure. Also, we seem to underestimate the utility and necessity of commas. We are carrying the baby all of the time which puts a lot of pressure on your shoulders. Dr. Knitcrit says: We? You? Which is it? Pronouns must agree and strictly speaking, the second person should not be abused in this manner, even if it is used consistently. Maybe breastfeeding is causing tension in your shoulders. Dr. Knitcrit says: Maybe. But your writing isn't helping, either. Lack of sleep can cause emotional stress or anxiety. Dr. Knitcrit says: Well, so long as it can't cause both. Is it getting harder and harder to ignore the knots and pains in your body? Dr. Knitcrit says: Not as long as your prose provides the welcome distraction of righteous indignation. Well let us spoil you just a little with a massage designed for the needs of a mother. Dr. Knitcrit says: Again, do not fear the comma even though at this point it actually kind of fears you. Studies have shown 1 hour of massage can help replace 4 hours lost sleep or a more relaxed Mama is a more effective mother for her child. Dr. Knitcrit says: (1) footnote the source (2) Studies have also shown that this statement - and please note that it is a "statement," not a "sentence" - is completely incoherent. (3) Numbers should be written out.

$100 = 60 minutes
$145 = 90 minutes
Dr. Knitcrit says: Would you accept a copy of Elements of Style lieu of cash?

Obama's speech in Cairo

Other than evoking the golden rule in its final minutes (and what preceded the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" made it less banal and useless than it otherwise might have been), this speech was truly masterful. Unbelievable, actually. And it truly sucks that it was blocked in Iran.

The Disgruntled Lamb

The first of three May baby projects was completed on schedule (though the recipient arrived two weeks early). The other two May babies were obliging enough to come late, but I'm still not done with their knits. Teach them to be accommodating.

For Leo the Early, I knit the Sheep Yoke Baby Cardigan by Jennifer Little of Looking Glass Knits (free Ravelry download). I'm pleased Leo turned out to be a boy, even if he was two weeks early - I chose unisex colors, but the sweater is better for a boy than a girl, conventionally speaking (and please don't revoke my third-wave feminist badge for saying so).

















I hate to say it, but I'm ambivalent about both the pattern and the product. I knit it in the 6 month size and in retrospect, perhaps the 9 month size would have been smarter. That was my fault. I also wish that I had opted for a darker green, but there wasn't a good option available in the Rowan Wool Cotton; I think this makes the lambs look a little washed out.


















The pattern calls for duplicate stitch for the lamb heads and legs and between that and how far between lambs the white yarn has to be carried, it's nearly impossible to finish the inside satisfactorily. Sure, the lambs are cute on the outside, but it just torments me to think of their dark, twisted innards. I could have opted to do the lambs in intarsia rather than fair isle, but I wasn't confident about my ability to twist the yarn properly to avoid unsightly holes, and the pattern itself called for fair isle with duplicate stitch.

Additionally, there is no relationship between the duplicate stitch chart for the lamb heads and legs and the photos of the sweater provided in the pattern itself, so I had to disregard the chart and figure out a way to stitch the cute lamb heads. If you go to Ravelry and look at other versions of this sweater, you'll see what I mean - lots of sheep that look like they've spent a little too much time grazing in the pastures of Chernobyl. My attempts at non-mutant sheep came out pretty well, I think:



































The pattern's color chart for the yoke of the sweater won't print clearly on a black and white printer, so without easy access to a color printer, the yoke of the sweater must be knit within range of the computer. Even reading from the computer screen, the image quality of the schematic was also extremely poor, making it more or less impossible to read the row numbers (and I have better than 20/20 vision - I could have been a fighter pilot if it weren't for the math thing. Or, come to think of it, the girl thing).

The pattern also calls for evenly spaced increases in the green part of the yoke sweater, but it leaves it to the knitter to do the counting necessary to ensure even distribution without also providing proper increased stitch count after each row. Without the final stitch count, it takes some math to figure out the best way to place the increases. I also think I lost my (useless black and white) copy of the pattern, so I don't have those row count numbers anymore, either.

















But anyway, it's done and given and I never have to knit it again. Todd absolutely loved it, though, so I might consider knitting our baby a fall hat that incorporates the sheep motif. Or maybe I will just try to finish the baby blanket by October, since even I don't think I'll have it done by the end of July at this point.

Justice, New York Real Estate Style

Todd and I have been looking for a slightly more baby-friendly apartment - our tiny 4th floor walkup without laundry in the building has served us well, and if we had to, we could make it work with a baby, but it seems that because of the recession the Manhattan real estate market has actually been taken down a bit, with the upshot being we can probably afford a bigger place with elevator and laundry in a desirable neighborhood for about what we are paying now.

Suburban readers of this blog are probably still reeling at the thought of no laundry in the home, much less in the building. To this mind-boggling concept I will add that searching for an apartment in Manhattan also involves checking potential buildings at this highly informative website:

http://bedbugregistry.com/

Bedbugs. Oh, yes. They are coming back and they are taking over Manhattan. Part of the reason for the comeback is at this point, the only pesticides that will consistently kill them are illegal (officially, anyway) in the United States. Bedbugs don't spread disease, but they are gross and their bites itch. And I know this because I have lived with them in India. Many of them, actually.

So far, Todd and I have escaped the plague, though one of my colleagues at work was not so lucky, and this became a source of concern because my office is next door to his office. My office mates and I went in on a - I kid you not - bedbug sniffing beagle to sweep our offices for potential contamination:

http://www.acexterminating.com/

The beagle gave us the all-clear and has subsequently cleared my colleague's office, too. Beagles are apparently 98% accurate when properly trained. So far, so good.

Anyway, the point is, we've been looking for a bedbug-free two bedroom for about two weeks now and have possibly come up with a good situation, but we won't know if we have it until after the long weekend. There have been some tragedies along the way which are still too fresh to be funny, much less blog fodder, but this I can report:

We were chatting with a realtor who told us something that we had already heard from another realtor, namely, that the Coldwell Banker group was going under. Mostly I think that real estate agents in New York City are bloodsucking bedbugs in human form whose "profession" consists largely of collecting upwards of $2,000 to $4,000 (or more) to unlock doors of vacant apartments and then stand around looking at potential renters/buyers like they are taking too long. So my sympathy for Coldwell Baker employees is limited.

Anyway, this realtor, who worked for Coldwell Banker, mentioned that the current theory among employees as to why Coldwell Banker is shutting down is as follows: at the height of the real estate boom in NYC about three years ago, Coldwell Banker rented a very, very expensive set of office suites somewhere in midtown. Now that the market has crashed and rentals and sales are not bringing in as much revenue, the rent for the office suites - which Coldwell Banker is locked into by the terms of its lease - far exceeds the revenue that the company is bringing in.

Which means, as alert readers may have already deduced, that Coldwell Banker, a real estate company, is going out of business because it made stupid decisions about the real estate that it chose for its headquarters. Which is a rare instance of deeply satisfying poetic justice in my book, almost making the past two weeks of apartment seeking stress worth it.

There is a first and last time for everything

About a month ago, I was tipped off on an 80% off store closing sale at Cadeau Maternity. I got there bright and early and emerged, dazed, two hours later, saddled with two massive bags of high-end European maternity clothing and enormous feelings of inexplicable yet also somewhat explicable guilt - inexplicable because all these fabulous items had cost me a mere, totally within my budget $240 and somewhat explicable because my Calvinist-esque upbringing could serve as a case study for proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Weber was absolutely correct about everything he said in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Walking home from a meeting this past Thursday, a woman in the fashion industry stopped me on the street and asked to take my picture - she worked for a maternity design firm, and she took my picture even after I had nearly scared her off with a panicked, slightly guilty monologue about how the only reason I perhaps looked good was because Cadeau was having an 80% off sale and if it weren't for that I would never be worthy of such attention and praise.

The outfit, in all its decadent, guilt-inducing glory: