My trip to Seattle was wonderful – I had such a fabulous time and was so sad to say goodbye to my superfantastic friends. While I don’t regret moving to Minnesota, I was a little distraught to realize that within a few blocks’ walk from my friends’ apartment, I had already passed more restaurants than we have in the entire town of Northfield (*sigh*). In my 3+ days in Seattle, I ate better than I have since the day we left Boston. I also shopped at Uwajimaya, it is to Japanese grocery shopping like MDSW is to fiber. (If there’s anything that ever makes me think I may not be able to live in Minnesota for a long time, it’s the sheer lack of Japanese grocery stores anywhere within driving distance. I can deal with the low ethnic diversity, the long winters, the 2:45 daily commute, even the dearth of quality restaurants, but oh, the Japanese food!)

Speaking of Japanese groceries, I bought something with an intriguing ingredients list.

Is some translator having a laugh at the expense of a food company?

Margaret, Richard, and I made dinner on the first night – salad, fresh bread and locally produced goat cheese (and seasoned cheese curds!), veggie lasagna (half spinach, half mushroom), and chocolate layer cake with fluffy marshmallow-like frosting. Ben came over, so did his sister Katie and (BIL) Eric. I’ve known Ben for a million years (he’s one of my closest friends from college, also brother to Annalisa), but this was the first time I’d met Eric or spent any real time with Katie. I talked and laughed so hard, I thought my cheek muscles would never stop aching.

I reunited with Esther K., who was my best friend when we were 4 years old. We lost track of each other in college, hadn’t spoken in 13 years, and just found each other a few months ago. She looked beautiful and seemed really happy. That’s Margaret and Richard, Ken (boyfriend) and Esther, and me.

Click for big!

Probably the highlight of the trip was a sweet hike in the lovely Wallace Falls area.

[A brief aside - call me stupid, but I didn't realize there were mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Although I'd certainly heard of Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Ranier, the Cascades, etc., I didn't quite put 2 and 2 together until the airplane pilot started pointing out the different mountains as we went over them. For some reason, I thought there were only evergreen trees and rain in PNW.]

My favorite photos from the hike:

Thanks, guys! It was a blast to hang out again.

The sleeves of Dad’s sweater are now complete! Not only that, but they were wet blocked and (drumroll) maintained their shape!

My passport off of Sleeve Island

I cast on the body and promptly ran out of yarn after a few rounds. Whoops!

Now that summer’s almost over (holy crap, that went by quickly), I want to share with you the 2 things I learned about lawn care.

1) Have sharp blades on the lawnmower. This makes mowing much easier, plus it is better for the grass. It also helps if you have a large green elf, as I do, to push the mower.

2) Make it as easy as possible to water your lawn.

I am going to rhapsodize for a moment about this lawn sprinkler. My dad told me about these self-propelling traveling sprinklers (I’d never heard of such craziness before), and I had to immediately hunt it down and see for myself. It’s the LR Nelson RainTrain 1865, and how did I ever live without it? You lay down the hose around the lawn, and it creates a track for the sprinkler to follow. Since it can drag up to 100 feet of hose, you can water the entire lawn without going out to move the sprinkler once. It’s pricey (for a sprinkler, ~$60), but it sure beats running and dragging every 20 minutes. It has 2 speeds (fast, slow) plus a stationary setting. The sprayer bars can be adjusted to water up to a 30 ft diameter circle. Combine this with the automatic winding hose reel, and it’s pretty simple to get the lawn watered. The only caveat – don’t try to make it turn too sharp a corner, it will jump the track and wander off, hit the neighbor’s house, and dig a hole in their yard.

I’m off to Seattle for a few days. Have a great weekend, everyone!

There are a few things rattling the cage today – not enough content in any of them for an entire post, so I’m throwing them all together in a pot, like stew.

1) I’m not much for crocheting, but have you seen Patricia Waller’s crochet designs? They are definitely worth a second look.

 
 
2) There was cake baking going on last weekend – would you like a slice of peach blueberry almost-shortcake? Recipe is here.

If you use a 9″ springform pan, I recommend that you double the crust recipe. I also doubled the amount of instant tapioca because my peaches were quite ripe and juicy. Also – no need to peel the peaches! The recipe could hardly get any easier. It’s even good cold.
 
 
3) Have you heard the craziness that is the Kansas school board’s decision to remove evolution from its science curriculum? Read more about it here. Bobby Henderson (a concerned citizen of Oregon) has written an open letter to the school board with an alternate theory of Intelligent Design – namely, that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I love it!

I think knowing both the weight and the length of yarn is important when you deal with handspun yarn. Accurate measurement of yarn length has been a little bee in my bonnet for some time. I started low tech:

A David Reed Smith niddy noddy

Measuring yarn this way requires winding and counting. Something happens in my brain when I try to count high numbers – I can easily skip, say, from 135 to 145 without realizing it. (How do I know I do this? I count paces when I jog – kind of an OCD thing, I guess – and I realize I went from low hundreds to mid hundreds when I couldn’t possibly have run that far.)

I moved up to medium tech:

Yarn Meter by NKK

This was a good idea, at least in the conceptual stage. But the Shakespeare fishing reel counter that does the actual measuring is really not suited for yarn. After measuring several thousand yards of yarn (yeah, really), it no longer turns accurately. I’ve disassembled it many times and removed every last bit of fiber, and it still isn’t right. I don’t know what can be done with it.

I considered high tech:

This model will cost you >$150!

But I didn’t think I needed to spend that much.

So I whined on Fibernet, and I was rescued! Cj. Aberte (who I will forever think of as Cj.-The-Genius!) devised a clever homemade yarn measuring device that is REALLY ACCURATE and damn cheap to put together.

Mine is made from the lower half of a dead lamp (I unscrewed the top part, cut the wiring free, and kept the stem and base), a measuring wheel (Rolotape), two O-rings from a water filter, a tensioner from my LK150 knitting machine, and hook-and-loop tape to hold the thing together.

I keep mine tall so it is almost directly in line with my swift. Yarn comes in the wire eye, through the tensioner, around the wheel (between o-rings), and back through the wire eye, to my barrel winder for final winding. I measure yarn after washing because it does shrink somewhat, and another winding helps separate any strands that may have stuck together during their last bath.

Lucky for you, Cj. has given me permission to distribute a copy of her plans and ideas. You can download your own .pdf copy for free by clicking here.

James says: Please respect the copyright notice included on the plans for the measuring wheel.

Most of the time, I start sweaters by knitting the sleeves. For some reason, it always takes me a gazillion tries before I cast on with no mistakes, so it’s better to just start with the small sleeve.

I’m nothing if not consistent – when I began Dad’s sweater, I couldn’t find a cast on that I thought was loose enough. (Is it worth mentioning that I at least learned a new-to-me cast on method?) For the first sleeve, I eventually decided to make a provisional cast on with the intent of removing the holding yarn and finishing with an exceedingly loose cast off. It’d slipped my mind that a setup row was required, I had to unravel and reknit the last round. Ever try to unravel a knit and purl combination from the wrong end!?! Yep, you’re right – it doesn’t! After that madness, I started the second sleeve without doing any of the cuff at all. Once it’s cast off on top, I’ll pick up the stitches and knit the entire cuff downward.

Almost off Sleeve Island

With the second sleeve nearly completed, I’ve just about run out of yarn. I think I have another 6 or 8 ounces of singles, it’ll be a big plying session tomorrow. A gal I work with saw the yarn and thought the color reminded her of cornfields – deep green leaves, gold and brown tassels, yellow kernels, turquoise skies. Works for me.

I’ve been mulling over the next project, even as I have stepped aside from the Shocking! jacket (for the moment) and work my way through Dad’s sweater. It may be time to do a real Fair Isle sweater with jumperweight Shetland yarn. Yes, yes. I have a Ron Schweitzer kit (Night Sky), purchased ages ago from a sweet lady who was I think losing her eyesight to the point that she could not knit fine yarns easily. I’ll start digging around for that tonight.

Last thing – a big CONGRATULATIONS shout out to my pal Carrie, who, with her boss Gary Urton, has made an archeologic breakthrough of huge significance. It was published in yesterday’s issue of Science, one of the widest-read and hardest-to-get-into science journals in the world. Carrie, I am so proud of you!

After months of work (albeit on-and-off type of progress), I have finished the Shocking! sweater.

What is wrong with this picture?

a) Nothing, it looks great.
b) It’s missing buttons.
c) THE SLEEVES ARE FIT FOR AN ORANGUTAN WITH MASSIVE BICEPS.

(I’ll give you a hint – it’s not answer a.)

To add insult to injury, one sleeve has a dropped (running) stitch. I found cleanly cut yarn ends, so I must have done it with a scissor snip at some point. That, and the body is just too wide at the underarm. Blocking cures many ills, but it can’t take 4″ of width off of a sweater.

Crap.

Let me hasten to add that before blocking, the sleeves were the right size and length. The body was a little short and wide, but it wasn’t enough to give me pause. I did swatch before embarking on this sweater, and I did dress the swatch. I’ve already woven in all of the ends, and I did it so thoroughly that it will be impossible to undo them.

So… what would you do?

I’ve been shopping.

We’ve got about 4.5 oz of dyed silk top from Carol, brown and white organic Shetland yarn picked up from the final closeout day of the LYS (sigh), Meileinweit sock yarn and Latvian Mittens from Three Kittens Yarn Shoppe in St. Paul, and 4 balls of cheap crochet cotton (size 10) because… well, because my upstairs bathroom needs a curtain, and I wanted to get something that, when it fades, won’t really bother me.

I finished the cashmere cowl last week! Here it is in its final blocked glory.

Love how it turned out. I was going to have glam pictures of me modeling it, but let’s face it. It actually gets hot in Minnesota. (Yeah, I know, you probably thought it was tundra-country, but temps are in the 90s now, people.) Shiny and sweaty just don’t jive with glam, so all you’ll see is a neatly folded cowl on the clean floor. But you can smile ‘cuz you know I cleaned that floor just for you.

Project specs – handspun cashmere yarn, 2 ply, fingering weight, handdyed with madder extract. The stitch pattern (Print of the wave) is from Sharon Miller’s Heirloom Knitting. Knit on 2.0 mm (US0) needles.

The pattern in brief: Do a figure 8 cast on for the appropriate number of stitches, put the lower half of stitches on reserve, knit until you don’t have enough yarn left for a full repeat, and do a 3 needle bind off. Selvedges are slip-stitched, and there’s a 5 stitch seed border on both sides.

I have been busy and not blogging because I have been busy with stuff that is just boring. I mean, I spent 5 hours yesterday hemming pants. Take home lesson from that wildly dull adventure: proper presser feet can really help make overedge stitching and blind hemming look better.