This is ynough, Grisilde myn.

Huzzah! I finished the Chaucer paper and sent it off to my prof. Only 6 weeks late, really not that bad in the scope of things. And, of course, I could not hold off on that reward yarn and have knitted a sock. The partner's on the needles, and I'll post a picture anon. I'm banking on not getting second sock syndrome, having just been through that bout of second draft syndrome.

Actually, a thought on that: the only sock I've really had second sock syndrome with was one of the only pair I've made out of non-self-striping yarn. I think that seeing those stripes stack up really keeps me knitting, and knowing exactly how many I need to knit before turning the heel also seems to make it go quicker -- kind of like the way back from someplace you've driven or walked always seems shorter than the way to it because you know exactly where you're going and how long it will take.

For what it's worth.

Next up: two stacks of short papers to grade (cake!), some medieval mysticism to read (reading! how lovely in comparison to writing!), and a baby sweater for my colleague's granddaughter to knit. More on that anon as well.

conclusions, beginnings, and a yarn bribe.

Things have been in a shameful state recently here chez Looking Glass. One semester ended, a new one began, and ALL kinds of work did not get done. That Chaucer paper about which I jauntily wrote a few weeks ago is still incomplete, and I've got a big stack of papers to grade that are so late that my students have started joking around about their status as historical documents. I've been whiny and neurotic and just generally a loser, and I'm downright peeved at myself.

Ergo, very little knitting to speak of. I have only knit about 2 more pattern repeats on my mitten, mostly during the episodes of Lost I've taken time out to watch. These will be awesome mittens if I can ever finish them before winter ends! Just trying them on for size, they are very warm.



Only two things are providing hope: my darling, funny boyfriend and a shipment of new Knitpicks Felici I bought myself as a yarn bribe. What gorgeous, jewel-like colors! But I can't knit it until that paper is in.


Now, Jennifer K., get your act together and finish your $@&%ing paper!!

New world, new sock

I'm finally getting over my post-election exhaustion. I'm so happy to live in a country I can feel proud of again! And, heaven knows, excited at the possibility of an end to an environment of anti-intellectualism! As exciting as it is, though, I almost feel sad -- I had so much expectation and anxiety about politics in the last month, that now it's all over I don't know what to do with myself! I'll just have to fill that hole with knitting.


Here's one jaywalker sock for Sarah. I love the way these socks look on the foot, but I can't say I adored the knitting process. And I know that she is going to gripe about how hard they are to pull over her heels. Too bad. If she hates them, I'll be happy to take them, because I love them.

Specs:
Pattern: Jaywalker by Grumperina
Yarn: Knitpicks Felici in colorway patina
Needles: Knitpicks options size 2

Other things to feel contented about: staying on top of my grading, perfecting my scone recipe, coming closer to having an idea what I want to dissertate about, and blissful Sunday afternoons working at the coffee shop in the most delightful company...

Produstination

Comprehensive exams are in just a few days, and of course what that means is studying 24/7. And by "studying 24/7," what I mean, clearly, is "watching the Olympics, cooking unnecessarily fancy food, drinking quite a bit more wine than health benefits warrant, listening to Moby Dick on CD, patting myself on the back for listening to such an erudite book, and knitting." It's been productive procrastination city here chez Looking Glass.

The upshot:

Significant progress on both Radcliffe cardigans, especially the one for my mom, whose body is only about 6 inches from completion:



Quite a bit of length on the chevron scarf (man, I'm hoping those wrinkles block out!):


The cuff of a fair isle glove:


And -- steel yourselves -- I've made a sock.


After setting a lot of stock in my being a non-sock-knitter, I have knit a sock. I understand a little better now what the appeal is -- it's pretty quick knitting, despite the tiny gauge, and it's definitely satisfying to try it on every 15 minutes or so and marvel at the perfect fit. This is a trial run at knitting socks for my sister, whose only real luxury as a second-year OB resident is the fancy socks she wears under her clogs. She's picky though, about itchiness and thickness -- I'm hoping that this Lorna's Laces yarn fits the bill, as it's about the softest and thinnest sock yarn I could find.

Not usually a fan of variegated yarn, either, I find myself inordinately pleased at the fabric this yarn creates, though it was a bit tough finding a pattern for the cuff that was both elastic and not marred by the striping. I finally settled on a double eyelet rib.


Now -- merciful heavens -- I can't wait to buy a skein of solid sock yarn and try my hand at something more complicated!

ahh... summer reading and knitting

The papers are all officially finished, graded, and taken care of! And I've dutifully started in on the reward yarn! (actually, to be totally honest, I may have started in on the reward yarn before I finished that last paper...) I'm happilly knitting away, while listening to The Age of Innocence on CD -- the first installment in the summer Comps-prep reading.


Though a chevron scarf is in the offing, I decided to start with a La Parisienne beret first, so that I could just knit until the yarn was through for the scarf. The two have very similar chevron designs. It's been a bit of a humbling experience for me, since I always think I know a better way to do something; I started out by using my go-to increase instead of the kf&b increase the pattern specified, because I thought it would look nicer. It is true that this kind of increase creates a clean, etched-looking line of stitches that matches very nicely the line created by the double decreases. However, all of that knitting into the row below was basically creating a line of EZ-style fake seams of slipped stitches that were much less vertically stretchy than the increases, and I had to rip out and start over again, following the directions as written.

It's also been a lesson in color theory. I chose these two colors because they looked good together in the skeins; they are pretty much the same value. Knitted up, the fact that they are the same value makes for a somewhat bright color combination, just on the edge of what I'd call garish, and not at all what I was expecting:

I think I like it though (and if not I'll gift it). The yarn I'm using -- Claudia handpainted and Koigu (the Gems sportweight was too big) -- doesn't stand up particularly well to frogging, which leads me to suspect that the finished product will not be very hard-wearing. I'm hoping that a scarf and a hat are not particularly hard-worn items.

The next knitting project in the hopper is to pop this baby on the swift:


That's one of a bag of Reynolds Candide, which I am going to use to knit my mom a Radcliffe Cardigan. It will be fun to follow my own directions like any other knitter, and see where they could be clearer. Candide is totally not the yarn I'd choose for my own sweater -- it's pretty darn scratchy -- but it promises to be very hard-wearing, and my mom is not bothered by itch. It is disappointing when your lovely hand-knit item starts to pill and stretch, as in fact happened to my own prototype Radcliffe (Swish DK? Not such a great yarn for adult sweaters). I am hoping that this Candide one lasts longer.

Hurray! Here's to summer knitting, finally here!

Two saints down...

... and only one to go. Still feeling the end-of-term doldrums, but I'm slowly, slowly nearing the finish. At least the essay I am allegedly working on right now is a bit more in my field, being only half about a saint and half about a book...


Meanwhile great progress has been made, frogged and made again on the knitting front. I got the front bands done on the green peach blossom jacket, and am on a sleeve hiatus while I decide whether I have enough dark green yarn for both sleeve hems and i-cord closures, or whether I need to rip out the hem facing on the bottom and redo it in lighter green to conserve dark green yarn. That's a project that's destined to be done in front of the TV, I think, and too fiddly to knit on the subway, which is what I've been doing lately.

That barely-discernible fair isle sweater has been frogged (actually the second time I've frogged something partially-knit with this same periwinkle Baby Cashmerino), and I finally cast on something I'm happy with:


A February Baby sweater, a la EZ, only I was too lazy to go out and buy the book with the pattern, so I eyeballed it after briefly consulting a million project pictures on Ravelry and looking at Google Books (which will display only the second page of the Baby Sweater on Two Needles pattern). But, being me, I had to resize the whole thing, going for 26 instead of 20 pattern repeats on the body and casting on 56 stitches instead of 40. As other people have noticed, the yoke does seem to start too small and increase a bit too quickly -- were I to do it again I would start with a few more stitches and increase a little more slowly to keep its angle more in line with that of the rest of the sweater. Meanwhile, since I didn't actually consult the pattern so much as fake it, I did not realize that I should have cast on an extra two (?) pattern repeats under each armpit as I was dividing for the sleeves. I think, in fact, that the body looks perfectly fine the way it is, but I need to jerry-rig something now as I start the first sleeve. I'm thinking of just casting on another pattern repeat's worth of stitches and going with it -- the sleeves will still not be quite as wide as EZ's originals, but I think they will be fine.

I think it's perfectly clear what I have been expending brainpower on this week, as I claim to be working on papers...

However, honestly, this was the quickest-knitting, most fun baby sweater I've ever made. I did the whole yoke and body over the course of, I think, three trips to and from Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn in the last few days. Of course, each time I packed up stuff to entertain myself on these subway rides, I did diligently load like 3 articles and a book into the backpack as well... where they stayed, while I knit...

There's a name for this kind of behavior...

It's been a week of hard work here at Looking Glass Knits. Remember that last post? The one about all the schoolwork I had to do? Here's a rundown of what I've done in the last five days (five days!!!), which I had set aside to do nothing but write:

Revise paper on St. Margaret: check (reluctant check).
Write paper on St. Andrew: uh...
Write paper on Margery Kempe and St. Perpetua: er...

BUT!

Finish body of green Peach Blossom sweater with absolutely no recipient?

Check!


Begin working on another baby sweater for nobody, this time with barely-discernible fair isle yoke?


Check!!


Cast on for an Icarus shawl using yarn I stashed two years ago, nominally for my mother, even though she told me she would never wear a triangular shawl?


Check!!!


Take a drunken water taxi ride up and down the East River with equally drunk friends?


CHECK, BABY!


Shut up, conscience. Here's a monkey to distract you:

tales of hubris punished and patience rewarded

Here is what is on the docket for this weekend:

Hali Meidhad and Seinte Margarete, a few Canterbury Tales, a meditation on the Passion by Nicholas Love, and some NPR knitting.

You may notice that there is a totally new work in progress there on the trusty natural light windowsill. It's true -- I have become an incorrigible starter.

But in this case, there is a tiny bit of an excuse. I made a shocking discovery earlier this week after looking closer at the car intarsia sweater I was making. The process of switching from flat knitting to in-the round knitting I had done in order to do the intarsia part flat had made a significant difference in the shape of the stitches I was making -- and not just a difference in gauge. Witness exhibit A:

In the top half you can see my even in-the round stitches. In the bottom half are a bunch of squiggly, twisted flat stitches. It was at this point that I began to question the arrogance of my claim to be an expert knitter and precocious autodidact. I began to suspect that something was wrong. I flipped open a knitting basics book that had been mouldering on my shelf and made the shocking discovery that for five years I have been purling wrong -- bringing the working yarn around the needles in the opposite direction from the normal one, twisting all my stitches as I did so. It felt akin to being friends with someone for a number of years, only to discover that you have been calling him the wrong name that whole time. So I chucked the offending sweater into a corner for a while in a clear case of killing the messenger, and set myself to knitting a new sweater and purling the right way. Exhibit B:


I have two other excuses. The first is the discovery that another friend is pregnant, thus clearly necessitating a brand new baby sweater. This one is another crack at the top-down baby sheep sweater like the one I made for Andrew. This time I am keeping better track of the process so I can write it up and post the pattern. The yarn is Knitpicks Swish DK, but the blue and green yarns arrived quite a bit more neon than I had wanted -- as is often the case with Knitpicks yarn. So, having been emboldened by my Bristow experience, I popped the two skeins in a bath of water with half a packet of grape kool-aid, and fixed it! I think that the result is quite nice. The mottling of the dye gives the blue yarn a nice homemade look, as opposed to the mediocre acrylic baby boy sweater color it was before, and the green is a more subtle and organic hue too. I'm working out the sheep charts right now: I'm thinking garter stitch for some texture detail.

The second reason to start a new project is a newfound desire to perfect some patterns and post them, because...

My Ravelry invitation finally came!


Ravelry is great! Definitely not a replacement for blogging, and I do rankle at the restrictive nature of the program as it exists now (not sure how to add new patterns, can't register myself as a designer, can only use books already on the site in my library, etc), but it has been fun and exciting to snoop around, and I love the "favorites" feature and the feature that lets me look at what other people are doing with the yarns and patterns I have chosen. If you're on Ravelry too, my ID is lookingglass.

Works in Progress

Now that the top-down Arwen has been shipped off to its recipient, here's what's been cooking Chez Looking Glass in the last few weeks.

First things first, I have been doing a LOT of reading, of medieval lit, criticism of medieval lit, and more medieval lit. Three classes in medieval English literature, plus picking up a colleague's Canterbury Tales class while he's out sick, has led to a veritable onslaught of Middle English. I suppose it won't be long until I am blogging like this guy.

The fair isle yoke sweater continues to progress, having been divided for the sleeves. At a gauge of about ten rows an inch, however, it is moving along mighty slowly. To stave off boredom I have cast on for a number of other projects as well:

My Halloween costume: yes, this is the beginning of a Gryffindor vest. I'm knitting it in Ella Rae Classic Wool, which is certainly on the scratchy side but still very pleasant to work with and a steal at something like $4.50 a 200+ meter skein.

A pseudo-secret project. In Knitpicks Swish DK, which has been good in an economizing way. It has stood up to some ripping-out, which bodes well for its wearability, I think.

Another sweater for baby Andrew, also in Swish, in one of their lovely new heather colors. Question about this one for you loyal readers, though, if you can eyeball from the arm buds and neck size what the finished sweater's size will be: is the car just too small? It is proportional to the buttons I used for the wheels, but in proportion to the rest of the sweater it seems absurdly tiny. That could be hip, I guess, but it would depend on proper motif placement. Should I rip it out and make the car bigger, and give it intarsia instead of button wheels? Should I rip it way back and place the small car higher? Should I say, "this is a sweater for a one-year-old who will spill mashed peas on it the minute he puts it on, so stop your neurotic questioning and finish it"?