Cunning mittens

Looking at the teams over on Ravelry, I saw that (1) there was a Big Damn Heroes team and (2) one of the team members was none other than my long-lost spinning teacher from a very unhappy year I once spent in central Pennsylvania as an assistant professor. Shiny, right? So I decided to join the Browncoat Olympians and go for it. It is amazing how many hard core Joss Whedon fans also appear to be hard core knitters. I am apparently absolutely typical after all.

I figure if I do 15 rows a day, I'll have my Wintergreen mittens finished by the time the gimpy Canadian Olympic torch goes out. This cold calculation doesn't make for much Olympian drama, though of course the chances that I will actually manage to keep to this schedule are minimal. Plus of course I have dramatic back story - the Mitten Comeback - to keep things exciting.


















I decided that tara is right - if I did the original gray/cream color combination even though I didn't think it had enough contrast I would always and forever think about how I should have re-knit the mittens using better colors. So I've taken the cream from the originals and added a lovely natural brown - both Blue Sky Alpaca sportweight.

The brown alpaca/Browncoat tie-in is pure serendipity.

Time for a comeback?

I admit that the last time around, I thought the whole idea of the Knitting Olympics was kind of dumb. Now that I am older and possibly dumber, I am actually considering participating.

Loyal readers will recall my Wintergreen mittens tragedy, wherein I forgot the mostly-knitted project on an airplane and by the time I realized what I had done, it was Too Late. I did go and buy the exact same yarn for the project again, but on a whim decided to knit the Lillyfield mittens instead. Unfortunately, even though I was basically making gauge, it became clear about three quarters of the way through the first mitten that they were going to be immense, and so, after several months of denial, I bit the bullet and frogged the whole damn thing. For the record, Famous Knitblogger Grumperina actually had similar gauge problems with her Lillyfield mittens, and one of the reasons she is a Famous Knitblogger is she re-charted and otherwise rejiggered the entire pattern to make the mitten fit properly. I am not nearly that committed a knitter or, for that matter, blogger. Which may be why I am not famous.

I really did like the Wintergreen mitts, though, and I did pay for the pattern...you see where I'm going with this. My knitting Olympics project could be the Wintergreen mitts comeback - a potentially happy ending to a heretofore sad story.

The only question is whether or not I should use the yarn I have. If I do, I accept that the original gray/white wasn't quite high contrast enough for the Wintergreen design. In the interest of perfect closure, I should use my original yarn color choices, or should I keep the white and buy a new contrasting color? And should I play on the Yarn Harlot team or figure out the Ravelry Olympics scene?

Mittens and blues

Classes start on Thursday. I am dreading them though not for any particularly good reason other than perhaps all the time I have spent on planet lactation has made me feel like an alien about to land on the hostile planet of academia. I really, really, really don't want to store my breastmilk in the department refrigerator. That's what the icepack box in my breast pump bag is for, right?

I made these cute little baby mittens out of some worsted scraps in an effort to chase the blues away. My mood was not all that improved, but they are very cute and also very warm, thanks the fair isle motif. The pattern is a Ravelry freebie, searchable under "two colour mittens" by Abigail Welbourne.















I put one on db's hand and her eyes got very wide and then she began waving her hand around in the air, staring at it and giggling. She has clearly learned how to get on my good side.

Upstate is a different land

Growing up, I never understood why Democratic candidates would always win New York's senate seats, this despite the fact that my parents and everyone I knew voted Republican. I didn't understand about the New York City factor until I was older.

A recent trip upstate to visit my parents reminded me of my conservative roots, which I manage to repress most of the time here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is pretty much the bleeding liberal heart of the western world. So yes, I am aware that I've been away from Kansas for a while, but even still, I couldn't help but find this envelope - here photographed in the wild, sitting on top of my parents' stack-o-mail - a little disturbing.























Is it me or does that Eagle's beak look a little longer and more predatory than is strictly necessary? Ready to peck out the eyes of filthy illegal immigrants, perhaps? To feast upon the steaming entrails of freshly disemboweled MoveOn members? To pick clean the bones of Obama's dead on arrival attempt to reform healthcare?























On the bright side, The Land of Upstate is home to some spectacular winter sunsets.

Holiday madness

Db is very small and I am still on paid leave; therefore, it was actually possible to knit her a fine Christmas ensemble in less than one month:






















Yes, I should have been editing my manuscript rather than knitting this. And yes, db does have a neck somewhere under those jowls.















The dress is the Ravelry freebie Kaia Babydoll knit in the 6 month size for my 85th height percentile 5 month old daughter. I knit it in Zara (red) and Aurora 8 (gray); the red was held doubled and knit on 9 dpns; the gray was held single and knit on a 7 circular.















Modifications included knitting long sleeves. Basically, I followed the pattern but put the sleeve stitches on a holder; after I knit the dress I picked up and knit the arm stitches, picking up 8 stitches in the armpit and knitting in the round. I also did a k1p1 rib on the collar because it looks neater than a single garter stitch edge. To make it long enough, I also did one or two more skirt increase rounds than the pattern called for.















The necessary soaker is another free soaker pattern on Ravelry, searchable as Wool Diaper Cover by Cynthia Combs. Obviously I didn't pick the pattern because of its pithy name.

Todd's family has a disturbing tradition which involves the family patriarch (or whoever has had enough holiday wine to be suggestible) putting on a Santa suit and scaring all the babies and small children at the party. The small children receive awful plastic gifts to compensate them for their trauma; tiny babies, however, receive nothing more than a crippling blow to their developing subconscious.















Db looks annoyed, which of course makes me proud. The crying baby on the left is db's new cousin - the lucky recipient of the flower hat, pirate hat, and nautaloid toy of blog posts past.
















Db's adorable mary janes were also knit by me using the Tiny Shoes pattern by Ysolda Teague. Perhaps my daughter has exceptionally narrow patrician feet or perhaps I didn't quite pay enough attention to the gauge, but the medium size was immense. I knit one on December 23rd and despaired; on the morning of the 24th I did a little emergency surgery, taking a pair of scissors to the bottom of the bootie, frogging the bottom half, and then doing a three needle bind off after the 5 rounds of garter stitch called for in the pattern. I then knit the second bootie in a mere hour and a half (including all finishing) and wove in the ends of the dress while Todd loaded the car. Rock star finish.

Creepy materialism-teaching visit from Santa notwithstanding, it was actually the least painful Christmas Eve party ever because of db:

knitcrit: baby baby baby baby baby. babybaby?

annoying libertarian relative: baby babybabybaby baby!

knitcrit: baby baby.

strung out on Valium relative: babybabybaby babybaby baby. baby?

knitcrit: baby baby baby. babybaby! baby baby baby.

Babies - the new, non-alcoholic way to survive the in-laws' annual Christmas Eve party.

bottoms, tops, and a disturbing bustier

We haven't been so much with the blogging this past month here at knitcrit mission control, though there has been a fair amount of knitting and also a fair amount of criticism, the latter mainly taking the form of yelling at the TV whilst helplessly watching the public option die a slow, painful death. The former, a much more pleasant subject, involved knitting a soaker to go with Topaz out of the leftover light green - baby girls don't sit like ladies (the bulky diaper gets in the way, I suppose), so one way to help them pull off the dress is to provide a coordinated underlayer. In this case, the soaker I knit to go with Topaz also looks very cute with db's monkey onesie.

This was a freebie on Ravelry, searchable under the name "Fancy Pants." I had no idea what a soaker was before about three weeks ago and it turns out there's quite a range of soaker patterns out there, so I can't say that I had any reason for choosing this one - I can't even remember how I found it, actually.

For the past few winters, Todd has worn an embarrassingly ugly black knit hat emblazoned with the ASCAP logo (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). In some ways, this is the type of hat that one can indeed get away with wearing on the northern fringes of the Upper West Side, but I finally got sick enough of looking at it to make him probably the millionth Koolhaas to be worn on the streets of New York City. No matter - it looks great, of course - it's really a bulletproof pattern.

Db wonders why her dad gets the cool hat.























And finally, as I begin to contemplate my return to work at the end of January, I find myself looking at this this lovely image and wondering what exactly I find to be profoundly wrong with it. Besides everything.

Tropical Woodins

About two weeks ago, the final knitted gift for the final May baby was finally finished, boxed, and shipped to Singapore where it arrived just in time to help its recipient hone her hand-eye coordination skills.

















Woodins was Knitty freebie from a few years back and while I absolutely love the finished product, knitting the log got a bit tedious after the novelty of being able to tell curious subway commuters that I was knitting a log wore off. The woodins themselves also got a little tiresome after the 3rd one, but since I knit them after the log I was motivated to finish mainly because the thought of all that log knitting going to waste was unbearable.

















I lightly felted the log and the Woodins - it was a little awkward doing it in our building washing machines because you can't control the wash cycle, so I had to run two complete loads and just fish the Woodins and log out of the machine just before the spin cycle started. I was of course using hot water which meant that I needed a variety of tools - chief among them a pair of kitchen tongs and a long metal pole from an ikea shelving unit - to fish the pillowcase containing the log and woodins out of their scalding hot bath. The process of fishing the items out of the machine got me several aghast (and therefore rude) stares from someone who turned out to be the mother of one of the building residents; feeling awkward, I tried to explain myself and ended up in one of those totally annoying situations where I realize that my conversational attempts to be pleasant and diffuse an awkward situation have in fact made me look like an idiot.






















The Woodins were supposed to have very cute little leaf tails, but I knit them up and then looked at them and realized they were very cute little choking hazards and decided not to sew them on.