This weekend I did a lot of knitting, as I mentioned, and just shared the pictures with Marnie so I thought I’d put them here, too. This is the Ambergris sweater designed by Ann Weaver, which she [obviously] based on Moby Dick:

here's the front -- see how the design elements extend down into the ribbing?

close-up view of the flukes and ropes -- i really love both those elements

the side seam, a kind of whalebone inset

It’s great fun to knit, but it requires attention because there’s a lot going on at once — several charts, shaping, and the addition of a side chart in one small section (not shown here). I made a large Excel spreadsheet — oh how I love Excel spreadsheets — plotting out each row on the whole body. It makes it much simpler and so far I haven’t needed to frog anything….good, because the yarn is sticky and has long alpaca fibers here and there, which would make frogging a slow process. I’m really enjoying working on it, and love to imagine Marnie wearing it. The pleasures of knitting something special for someone you love, when they’ve had a part in the project so you know they’ll enjoy it.

*cough* *shiver* Back under the covers for me. Happy knitting, y’all.

so beautiful -- this is what the back of the sweater will look like, since it's the only area that's not cabled in some way

and here's one of the cable swatches; it's very neat, the way the rope emerges.

I’m actually a little bit afraid of knitting this sweater, just as I was afraid to read Moby Dick (which is the craziest idea in the whole world…really? afraid to read a book?). Just as with the book, I’m afraid it’s beyond me, too complicated for my feeble mind to manage. With the sweater, there are multiple patterns and cables going on simultaneously plus shaping. It’s knit in the round, bottom-up, and splits at the arms. So all the busy business happens simultaneously, and since I knit at night, while watching tv with my husband, when I’m kind of tired, well…..I worry. But I want to do it perfectly, so I’m just going to take my time, take each row for itself and make it right, and it’ll all work out. And perhaps I’ll love the FO as much as I love the book. Probably not, but maybe.

Here’s a funny thing about Christmas songs I found on the NPR music page. I especially love #6, though they’re all funny.

so funny!

Tonight’s the Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine, and if I love it half as much as I did last year, it’ll be overwhelming. Happy Friday, y’all! I hope you’re able to enjoy the holiday season and not feel too stressed.

p.s. OH — one more. There are a couple of Ryan Gosling tumblrs, and this is my favorite picture so far:

hey girl.

I’m very nearly done with my Laurayana sweater (the pattern was a birthday gift from Laura, thank you!), and I’ve been doing finishing as I’ve gone along. I pause and weave in ends as I go along, I block each piece as it’s completed, and I’ve sewn together the shoulder seams and knitted the finishing detail. I’m halfway through the 2nd sleeve (first is finished and blocked), so when I finish the second sleeve, while it’s blocking I’ll sew in the first and seam the side seams. Then, voila! Nearly ready to wear.

the neck finishing detail is 3 rows of stockinette, designed to curl and show the purled edge. It's a nice bit of texture to complement the deeply-textured front panel.

Here’s an FO shot of my cute little hat, my Berry Welty. You know it’s got a blue/purple hem facing, which is my little secret, and why I’m smiling so:

fits like a dream, and oh-so-warm. Thank you for the pattern, Kelly!

The next time I show my Laurayana, I’ll be wearing it.

the back, with shaping darts -- of course I had to do extra shaping for my waist, as always

that hem facing is madelinetosh DK, in tart. so tarty, so pretty! It won't be visible at all, since this is a pullover, but I know it's there.

Unfortunately for me and my knitting time, the next run of work is editing, not evaluation, and I have so much it’s stressing me out, waking me up at 1am. In fact, I got up at 1 this morning to get some work done. So this rate of progress will come to a halt for now, but it sure was fun!

Well, it is to me, so there. It’s my birthday eve. It’s a stunningly beautiful day, though my waking up to it wasn’t so nice. The hounds-of-hell heat dried me out so badly I woke up with a nose gushing blood. NICE. But who cares, it’s my birthday eve (see how well that works?). I’m spending the morning doing some deep housecleaning, since the floor-mopping fairies haven’t arrived in a while, and then I have some personal writing and thinking to do. After that I’ll pick up the first sleeve on my green sweater; last night I completely finished the collar and band, got it all bound off (loosely enough, go me!), and have spent the morning resisting taking a picture to show you. I lost — though I was going to take a picture of me wearing it, since it’s just the most adorable length, but I compromised and took some flat pictures. The color is kind of wonky from shot to shot — no idea how that could happen since it’s the same sweater, camera, light source, and background:

[wow those colors are all off!  bizarre. the emerald green in the previous post is right on the money.] Boy, I really love this sweater. It’s just hip-length, and swingy, and the yarn is so amazing, I know I’m going to wear it all winter long. Just not in my apartment, which will be sweltering all winter long. Stupid co-op.

But birthday eve, yay! Just 12 more hours to be 52. It was an excellent year.

ooh! that looks suspiciously like a finished sleeve!

mmm hmm. yep. that’s right. i did it. uh huh. me go girl. all riiiiiiight.

I picked up a couple of small souvenirs on our recent vacation; I always buy a pair of earrings, and every time I wear them I get a rush of the place.  The cool black ones I bought in Diocletian’s Palace, in Split (Croatia); the onyx and mother-of-pearl ones I bought in a little shop in Cusco; the heavy ones I bought in Udaipur, in India…such wonderful memories. This time, though, I bought two souvenirs, one from Laos and one from Cambodia.

my Khmer kroma, and Lao earrings

The scarf is called a Kroma, and you see them everywhere in Cambodia. They’re always checked, like this, and they’re quite often red. They’re always wrapped around people’s heads, to keep them cool, but they’re multipurpose items. They can be rolled into a pad and placed on your shoulder to cushion a yoke, or on your head to cushion a heavy basket; they can be used to carry babies and fruit; they can be worn around your neck, like a regular old scarf. It was the most distinctively Cambodian thing I could think of, that I could incorporate into my everyday life. I bought this at the big Central Market in Phnom Penh, and I have already worn the hell out of it.

lao earrings

These are heavy, and I’m having to train my earlobes to wear them. I’m definitely not a Buddhist (or art) scholar, so I’m absolutely guessing here, but I do wonder if there is some kind of Buddhist symbology in the design. Maybe not, but the wheel makes me wonder. I bought these in Luang Prabang, from a woman who sold her handwork on the sidewalk.

And now for the &c. Here’s where I am on my wonderful sweater (excuse my wet just-out-of-the-shower hair):

hi! look at my sweater!

(oh! see my earrings there?!) I’m at the waist now, so I’m hauling. I spent yesterday knitting, so I got a lot done. Here’s the back:

look at the pretty cables!

I’ve got another post percolating in my mind, but I probably won’t write it today. Yesterday, I watched a bunch of movies while I worked on my sweater: M, by Fritz Lang, Elf (for a complete whiplash-inducing change of pace), and three about Joseph Cambell. One of the Joseph Campbell movies was called Sukhavati, which means the place of bliss. So I’ve been thinking about a lot of the things he talked about and have something to say, but will do that later.

I now smell like coffee, my hands are shaking, my knees are all bruised, and my laptop is a bit out of whack. The top closes, and it seems to be working, but it’s kind of wonky. We always take it when we travel, because we upload the day’s photos and tell the day’s stories on our travel blog, so the timing of this little accident sucks. So far so good, though, so I hope the indestructibility of my ThinkPad continues.

Anyway, I’d written some of the post already, but now I’m kind of shaky so instead of reconstructing it, I’ll just leave this photo of where I am on my new birthday cardigan – the “52 is not dark and stormy” Dark and Stormy sweater by Thea Colman:

1 skein of yarn

Except for the rows where the cables do their biggest crossing, I cable without a cable needle now. The little twists, the easier crossing rows, it’s just me sliding stitches off the needle and rearranging them. Cool. Quick and easy, and no longer scary. I love the yarn (tosh vintage), the color shadings are fun (baltic) and make me happy. The design is simple and great fun to knit, and not boring — we’ll see what I’m saying when I hit the sleeves, of course.

So I’ll leave it here, at this point, and pick it up when we return. Off to put fresh sheets on our bed, put away the laundry, run the dishwasher, and pack. We’ll leave at 5 in the morning! WHEE!

• Eve’s Ribs Shrug, by Carol Sunday
• Tosh Merino DK, by madelinetosh (in the most beautiful color ever, Byzantine)
• KnitPicks Harmony circular needles

The pattern is brilliant so far – fun to knit, with an intuitive stitch pattern. The yarn is a continual jaw-dropping pleasure, between the touch of it and the subtle shifts in color, and my fingers and eyes are always greedy for more. And while I wouldn’t normally list the needles as such a great part of the package, in this case the needles really do add something – the soft clicking of the tips, I can barely feel the vibrations in the wood when they touch and the sound is just wonderful.

It’s all I want to do. I’d rather work on this than eat. I’d definitely rather work on this than do my paying work. I’d rather work on this than sleep. I know this crowd knows what I mean. If this is in your queue and you haven’t started yet, heads up: you’re really in for it.

To my real chagrin, though, I have to set it aside and do some work. Dang. Eve, you’ll be on my mind and in my heart the whole time, I guaran-damn-tee ya..

So what’s on the needles? There’s one I can’t reveal here, the wedding shawl, but here we go:

2nd Kai-Mei, ready to work the heel

My Kai-Mei socks – I’ve been sneaking little wearings of the finished sock because it’s so dang wonderful. Madelinetosh sock, in crow – feels kind of hard when you’re knitting it, but as the fabric flows from the needles, it’s softer than you think it’ll be. And when you soak it and block it? Really so nice. The pattern is clever and fun to knit, but when I was knitting the first sock I was just going on faith (Cookie A faith) because I couldn’t see how it was going to work. I highly recommend the pattern and the yarn.

OK, next?

oh, my dearly beloved Ishbel, languishing....

I do love this Ishbel, knit with madelinetosh lace, in lettuce. It’ll be my 3rd (why do I think “she’ll be my third”?), and the pattern is fun and the color is great and I love the whole deal but it’s been set aside for so long that I struggle to pick it up again. Once I finish the wedding shawl I’ll return to this because it’s going to be fantastic.

Next?

what is wrong with me?!

Stop it, me! Stop! Why did I start this one?! I had plenty to work on, the last thing I needed to do was to start another project, but I did. This is Baktus, and I got about 1/3 of the way through it with Noro Silk Garden Sock (pictured above, the yarn cake) when I decided that I’d rather alternate the Noro with a black yarn. So even though I had no business starting this one in the first place, I frogged it and started over, alternating it with a KnitPicks Essential Kettle Dyed, in soot. [Lori, do not start another project!!]

such a 3-D blankie!

Totally Autumn, which I’m knitting with Cascade 220 Heather in chocolate, so it’ll be more like a blanket. The photo represents the length I get from one skein; since we want it to be ~6 feet in length, I’ll need 7 skeins and of course I’d bought 6. Luckily the sale is still on at Webs, so I bought additional skeins.

Next?

hanging my mondo head in shame and denial

This project, the Mondo Cardigan in madelinetosh merino (graphite) has been so painful. I had enough yarn to complete the sweater, but I foolishly didn’t look at all the skeins before I started. One of the lovely things about madelinetosh yarns is the variability in color, but this time it bit me in the butt. When I got to this point on the first sleeve, I noticed that my last two skeins were quite obviously blue. That would not work. I couldn’t find any graphite in any of the online stores, so (to use Yarn Harlot’s phrase) I threw up the Bat Signal in the rav forums, pleading and begging. Very kind raveler Glennae offered to sell me two of her skeins, which looked like a match to mine, but that would leave her with an insufficient amount of yarn to knit a sweater – the reason she bought it. I didn’t want to leave her in that spot, so I basically just went into denial and ignored the problem. Then, last weekend, I “randomly” decided to look through ravelers’ stashes to see if anyone had any of this yarn, and found Jenny – boopersin on ravelry. Jenny, O Jenny, my new BFF and savior. I wrote her asking if she’d sell, told her my sob story, and she quickly agreed. Isn’t she wonderful? Friend her immediately if you’re on rav, she’s a keeper (and Glennae too, if you don’t know her yet). So Jenny’s two skeins are winging (or brown trucking) their way to me, which means I’ll be able to finish my Mondo Cardigan. Whew.

Next?

froth and beads

Is this technically “on the needles,” given the fact that I’ve obviously pulled out the needles? Apparently not. It’s gorgeous. It’s Liquid Silver, by Rosemary Hill, with Elann Silken Kydd, a luscious and halo-ey mohair and silk blend, with glass beads. I started knitting it when I first returned to knitting a couple of years ago, and honestly, it was beyond my beginner’s skills. I struggled with the very thin yarn on the very slippery needles, with nothing on hand to thread the beads onto the yarn. So I got this far and then put it away. Apparently at some point I pulled the needles out – to use them for another project, probably? – but I don’t remember doing that. The pattern would be very easy for me now, so I hope to frog this and just start over with the same pattern. After all, I have the beads.

I know this is supposed to be a fearless inventory, but I’m not being fully honest here. There’s a sweater in progress, halfway up the back but I don’t like it so I’ll frog it and reuse the yarn, and a Christmas stocking for one of my girls, just begun and set aside.

There. Now I’ve been really fearless, I’ve confessed my excess. I feel much better. And I just noticed how many of my projects are made with madelinetosh yarn. I love her.