Nothing remarkable has happened chez Sheila in the past few days, but it seems like I should post something, since I do have the blog and there are at least half a dozen people who actually read it!

The night temperatures are finally fairly reliably above 50 degrees, and we planted the tomatoes, corn, peas, beans, spinach, basil and parsley that we hope to enjoy by the end of summer. I go out to the garden to check on their progress daily; the tomatoes were already starts, but the other vegetables are just seeded.

I’ve been waiting for my badge to a certain major software company to be ready so that I can start my job with them, so I’ve been working from home, doing “self-study” as it were, for my SQL Server certification exams. It gets a little lonely and I don’t understand how people can do this all the time. Pretty soon it will be a distant memory, so I’m not too concerned.

Walking… I’ve been walking a bit for my health and to rest my wrist from the bicycle… you might call it wristless restlessness. There are some amazing hills around the neighborhood and it’s excellent exercise. Now is the tail end of lilac season and dead center of iris time, going into poppies and daisies. There are so many flowers, flowering trees, flowering bushes and otherwise blooming plants that it makes me think about all the years I lived in places where nobody seemed to care so much about prettifying their surroundings. Was it the place, or was it the times?

My walking took me to a bead shop about a mile away, and I bought some Delica beads with which to make a small bag that may or may not hold my iPod Nano one day. I wanted to do something different, and so making a peyote stitch bag seemed just the thing. I’m taking my time with it, stitching a couple of rows at a sitting. It’s not terribly difficult, but the beads are tiny and the strain on the neck and eyes is to be considered.

I also started a pair of socks, the “Padded Footlets” from Interweave’s Favorite Socks. Only I didn’t realize that they were padded until I started knitting them, and when I got to the part where you are supposed to double the yarn and continue to knit with size 0 needles I just said No. I am using Colinette sock yarn, and I like it a lot, though it seems to be a little overtwisted.

I’ve spent a lot of time weeding the garden lately. 

I have to laugh at that last sentence.  I’ve said before, but I’ll say it again:  a garden, in my world view, is a place where you grow vegetables.  However, since I moved to the Pacific Northwest mumbly-mumbly years ago, I have learned to refer to my yard as a garden.  It is, in point of fact, much too cold yet to plant vegetables here.

So, while I’ve been weeding, my mind wanders to knitting.  I inquired of myself how weeding could be compared to knitting, and found that I preferred to focus on how they are not alike.

Nobody has ever approached me to ask me if I were weeding.  They’ve never asked to see my weeding, or how many years I have been weeding.  They don’t care where I learned to weed, or what got me interested.  They do sometimes compliment me on my weeding ability, but only because they don’t want to do it themselves!

I’ve never been asked to teach a weeding class or to write a weeding blog.  Also, weeding is not as portable as knitting.  I can’t sit in a class and weed.  I also do not generally look forward to taking a weeding break.  When it is time to go to bed, I never say “just one more weed”!

If I rip out, frog, or otherwise invalidate a knitting project, I do not fear that in two weeks time several more smaller yet identical unfinished projects will take its place.  And finished projects such as the lace shawl I completed a couple of weeks ago do not throw off spores so that other lace shawls will crop up where I least expect them– unfortunately.

Yet there is one thing true about both weeding and knitting:  the completion of the project gives an immense sense of satisfaction.  And then you can do it all over again.

Speaking of knitting, my wrist hasn’t completely knitted itself back together into a picture of health since I took the fall on the ice a couple of winters ago.  Therefore, weeding, planting, cycling, and other adventures make it throb with constant pain.  I must choose my knitting projects carefully:  lace, good; bullet-proof fabric bad.  Unfortunately, the Snow Star Farm “sport” weight is very nearly a worsted weight, yet Anna Zilbourg calls for a gauge of 5.5 stitches per inch using a size 4 needle.  Voila, bulletproof material.  So, until I either adjust the pattern to use a larger needle that produces a more malleable fabric OR choose to use a different yarn (such as Jamieson’s DK?), the Joseph Coat joins the pile of recently started-and-abandoned projects.

But that’s okay, because instead I started two more projects… no, not socks.  But two identical sweaters, except that one is using Blackwater Abbey worsted in the beguiling Ruby, and the other is using Jamieson’s Soft Shetland (now rebranded as something else, I dunno, go ask Ann) in a nighthawkish shade.  One sweater is large, the other medium.  And the pattern is… Alice Starmore’s Irish Moss, from Aran Knitting.  The one thousands of other knitters are doing, have done, and will do.

I think sometimes that knitting is like fishing.  Once you get hooked on a project, it is fun to reel it in and finish it, but finding the one you want, the one that you will eagerly spend hour after hour, day after day knitting,  requires knowing what bait to use and where to go fishing.

So it is that I have started three– no, four– projects since I completed the Sea Scallop.  No, wait, make that five!

First I thought I was going to knit the Faroese Flower Shawl using the Toots LeBlanc merino/angora I bought at the Madrona Fiber Arts market.  I loved the knitting, but it became obvious that using size 5 needles with this fingering-weight yarn would produce a shawl more suitable for a very short little person.  Using bigger needles, on the other hand, would make me feel like I was knitting with broomsticks,  Since I gave up both sweeping and bewitching some while back,  I decided it was not meant to be.

Next, I decided to go insane for a little bit and try the Rose of England using a 60/1 linen thread and size 0000 steel needles.  After a few rounds, reason returned and told me that for this one I will need a jeweler’s loupe and no disturbances whatsoever.  I like how the material looks, but I am not ready to go blind or to banish Sherlock or the other critters from my presence for months.

Then there was the vest using the gorgeous Blackwater Abbey worsted in the color Bluestack.  Nope, not in the mood to knit this right now, for no particular reason.

I browsed through all my shawl patterns and noticed Oregon.  Thinking that the “Fog” colorway of the laceweight merino I have in my stash would be perfect for this shawl, I cast on and got through two repeats of the print o’ the wave center.  Gorgeous, beautiful, ho hum.  Nope, I’m not in the mood to knit with air, which is what it felt like I was doing.

I considered other possibilities including (gasp) finishing long-neglected wips, but my hook came up empty.  I started to think about the fish I really wanted, and what kind of bait I needed to put on my line.  Individuality, I thought, would be good… something a thousand other knitters weren’t also knitting or have knitted or will knit.   Also, a good honest yarn with some special quality would look mighty tempting wiggling around in the water.

At long last, I had it.  Over the course of two visits to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, in the years 2004 and 2005, I had bought naturally-dyed sport-weight yarn from Snow Star Farm.  In fact, when I looked at the receipt that was still with the yarn, the last purchase was made exactlythree years ago.  Well, if that’s not an omen, I don’t know a rock from a sock.  The yarn was purchased not only due to the stunning intensity of its colors, beautifully dyed with osage orange, indigo, cochineal, madder, etc., but also because of the sweater that was hanging with the yarn.  It was designed by Anna Zilbourg and, as far as I know, the pattern has never been published.  However, the kind owner of the Snow Star booth mailed me a copy of the pattern after it had been written up.

(By the way, if you go to MDS&W this weekend, look for the Snow Star booth… I see that they will be a vendor again this year.  See if I’m not right about the gorgeous colors!)

So there I was with the bait:  a great unpublished Anna Zilbourg pattern and several naturally dyed skeins of good honest wool.  I cast my pole out over the waters teeming with possible projects and the Joseph Coat (for that is its name) swallowed it hook, line and sinker. 

Now to reel it in.

I found myself at a Lutheran confirmation service yesterday in a town distant from Seattle, in a church where all but the family of the comfirmant knew me not. The spring weather was perfect; just a whisper of a cool wind licked the flowering trees, and so I had set the Sea Scallop on her maiden voyage to this holy destination. Swirled around a crocheted top, the yarnovers of the shawl let its lilac color peek out in radiant beams across my back.

The service lasted at least two hours, and since no music was provided with the words to the songs, I couldn’t even enjoy that part of the service that I usually find more than tolerable. Some folks call it the “7-11″ religion… in every song there are seven words, and you sing them eleven times, or there are only seven songs that you sing eleven times… you get the drift. The words are projected onto a giant screen so that hymnals and the shuffling through them to find the correct page number are a thing of the past. None of the songs was written before 1990 and I stood there anachronistically, wondering where that “old-time religion” had wandered off to.

By the time we were released from our attentiveness to the various chantings and communions and laying on of hands and recitations, I felt I was wilting. Suddenly there sprang upon me a woman who asked me with unbridled enthusiasm: “Did you knit that gorgeous shawl?????!!!!!????” When I admitted I had, she look at the pew behind the one on which I had sat for the last two hours. I turned to see a row of silver heads, each atop an elderly woman. The springing woman asked them, “did you see what she knit??” and they all exclaimed that they had been staring at the shawl the whole service. By this time I wanted to crawl under the pews and out of sight, but I was unable to do so without appearing…ah…rather odd.

Ms. Springer then informed me that the pew behind me contained a good many members of the church’s knitting group. Further, she confided in me that she had just started her first “Alison Starmore”. I politely asked which one, expecting to hear a name like Mary Tudor or Ann Parr or some other English royalty, but she simply said “a child’s cardigan”. Whatever it is, I know it is going to bring immense pleasure to this woman, and that made me very happy.

Thus was my shawl a sort of knitted introduction to some genuinely nice people, and I left that church feeling just a little blessed.

I have a favorite sweater.

Hmmm… that reminds me of that little song we sang in Brownies 40 years ago…

I’ve something in my pocket, it belongs across my face;
I keep it very close to me in a very special place.
I’ll bet you’ll never guess it if you guessed a long long while
so I’ll take it out and put it on, it’s a great big Brownie smile!

Ahem. As I was saying, I have a favorite sweater. I didn’t know it was going to be that special when I bought it last fall. I found myself having to actually wear “business casual” clothing to my then-new (now over) contract position at the Gates Foundation, and since my previous jobs were definitely “casual casual” attire-oriented, I lacked wardrobe.

The sweater is my favorite because it is comfortable, easy to wear, and not unflattering. I get lots of compliments on it, but I’m not sure why, really– it’s just that kind of sweater. The top is knit from side to side starting at a cuff, and then the bottom is knit downward (in the conventional manner) from the bodice. Finally, an edging is attached around the entire sides and neck. There are no closures.

I’ve attempted to draw the schematic but pardon the naivete of it– it’s the first time I’ve ever used Adobe Illustrator:

The yarn appears to be an aran-weight softly spun wool which, unfortunately, won’t hold up for years due to its woolly penchant for pilling.

It may be somewhat obvious to you by this time that I have thought a lot about this sweater. The opinion at which I have arrived is this: the construction and shape of this sweater makes it a candidate for any knitting technique and any yarn, at any gauge. My sweater is a textured knit on the top, cables reach across from arm to arm, surrounded by seed stitch; the “skirt” of the garment is plain stockinette. But I can envision this in fair isle, or lace, or any other texture. Knitted plain all over, it could show off some great handspun.

The wheels are turning.