For your viewing pleasure...

The Honeycomb Shawl... a new Weaverknits design that is 108 inches of silk and wool goodness in a shockingly easy to create, all-garter-stitch form now up for examination at the Little Knits blog. It is part of the Trenna lace contest I mentioned a few months back, and, if it wins, the pattern will be available through Little Knits. If it does not, the pattern will be available for a nominal fee through me.

So... check it out, and Vote Weaverknits! I promise Grellow for all and Pornge for some.

Memorial Day in the Park

with a thermos of gin and tonic. It was good. The weekend was filled with biking and gym and food and family and finishing my book. Next up? War and Peace. In light of the comments Hannah and I have been getting, I think we can add a knitting aspect. Something Russian. Or with a Russian name. Maybe each participant can choose. We can start a Ravelry group. Discuss the book, discuss the knitting. Why not? Want to join? Send me an email or Ravelry message, or leave a comment.


I've been toiling away at Lochinver, and finally got a nice daylight photo that does justice to the different gansey textures it sports. I'm just starting the underarm gussets. I also got the yarn for a new project at Yarns in the Farms. Grellow, meet Pornge. Don't go thinking I'm done with Grellow. There's plenty of room for both in my House of Yarn.


The thing on the right is a simple scarf for my mom made of Alchemy Haiku. It's coming along. Finally, I saw Taylor, the office Yarns in the Farms Fiber Elf, in her completed Neiman. From Rowan Cashcotton DK. Perfect!

Another instance of Strong

In lieu of knitting content (Chris' Lochinver is still a large brown tube, mom's scarf is still a hazy blue blob), let me salute my friend Amy, who has just successfully defended her Harvard dissertation in Art History of the Ancient Near East. How to praise someone who has worked for ten years on something done solely for the love of it, the ideal of it, something that may take years to lead to a steady job with health insurance? Sometimes I feel that I surrendered by leaving that world for a job with a better salary than that of an assistant professor, with Blue Cross insurance, with paid vacation and the ability to leave my job when I walk out the door. However, Amy is strong. Stubborn. Smart. She just kept going until it was done.

So, what do you do for someone like that? Well, how about a gift of a mitered dishcloth and a bakelite pin from Brimfield Antiques Show?

Which, by the way, was awesome. I'll post photos to Flikr. And my miter is done, Hannah! Next project with iknityouknot? The War and Peace along. We both like the classics but don't like feeling like sophomoric drones who read them out of a sense of duty. I'll obtain a copy as soon as I finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is fantastic, by the way.

I'll end with a self-portrait from Brimfield. Lately it's been too many adventures and not enough time to chronicle them. Memorial Day weekend (did I mention paid vacation earlier?) should give me a chance to catch up and haul out some knittin to show you all.

New Hampshire Sheep and Wool and... Knitalong!

Sunday Chris and I drove up to New Hampshire, where, like last year, we parked along the highway in a "Park and Ride" lot and biked the 14 miles to the Hopkinton Fairgrounds for the Sheep and Wool festival (Chris likes to get photos while biking like the one above). The day was perfect... I delivered my small chocolate brown fleece (the random gift discussed a few weeks ago) to the Zeilinger Wool Co., who will process it and send me the roving in a few months. Hooray! Look how nice the Zeilinger lady was.
We ate buffalo cheesesteak sandwiches, lay in the sun and watched the sheepdogs (in another life we have sheepdogs instead of huge white lazy indoor cats), and did a little shopping. Okay, I ended up with a lot of yarn, but from only two booths! I was very focused! I even avoided blatant Grellow yarns, lovely ones!


That's 13 skeins of worsted weight creme-colored merino from Greenwood Hill Farm, producers of the very best merino I have ever used, one skein of their DK weight 2-ply in silver, and 5 skeins of 2-ply worsted from Zeilinger Wool Co. that was on sale for $1 an ounce. I have plans to make myself a warm wooly cardigan out of those skeins. The pattern in the middle is also from Greenwood Hill.

And I HAVE been knitting stuff. For instance... Here's progress on Chris' Lochinver from Fishermen's Sweaters. A brown tube of slightly varried textures. Not thrilling to view, but fun to knit.


And...

Hannah and I have started a knitalong, a two-person knitalong, making a mitered dishcloth each from Sugar & Creme SELF STRIPING cotton. We did not know of its existence until Saturday's trip to JoAnn fabrics and Savers. Neither of us has knit a miter. It's TIME.

Savers? It was good, really good. Hannah has organized photos. I, as yet, do not. I do have this one, however:

Strong

Yesterday my Dud raced in a 25K in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He did it with his arms.

I love my parents so much. What more can I say?

New York CITY!!!

This is how exciting it was for mom, even just to be on the bus the first day. When I lived in New York I eschewed the bus as being slow and unbearably frustrating in traffic. Now I appreciate watching New York pass by as I look out the window.

Okay, so Beth looks a little confused, but I think it's the result of the amazing feast before us: Chicken and waffles and sweet potato pancakes, along with grits (cropped out of the photo, sorry) and bloody marys at Melba's in Harlem. Melba herself let us in and greeted everyone. I was kind of starstruck and made my usual ridiculous blissed out face (remember the Norah Gaughan picture with me? Wow).

During our miles and miles of walking, we encountered the Hydroponic Coral Reef in the Broadway Windows at 10th and Broadway, which is, interestingly, an NYU dorm building where I lived my freshman year and ALMOST DID NOT MAKE IT. I am not one for dorm living... I moved out to an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens for the rest of my years in NYC.

And yes, there was some knitting... I got quite a bit of sock done while waiting for a salad at a small cafe in Soho. Oh! Oh! And I'm wearing the Tempest sweater that I've been wearing for months but haven't been able to post photos of! See how nice it looks in the wild? Anyway, for this lunch experience the three Weavers ordered three salads, which took 45 minutes to come from the kitchen, despite the fact that there were only two other customers in the joint. Oh, and one of the salads was not the salad we ordered. But they were so delicious that it was okay, just sort of sad, performance-wise, for the cafe.

Yes, there is some new yarn. Yes, I have been knitting other stuff around here, and some will be revealed soon. Meantime, I'm TIRED! I'll likely be at New Hampshire Sheep and Wool this coming Sunday, so shoot me an email if you'll be there!

And the next weekend Chris and I will be in Brimfield, MA for THE SHOW. It's our first time. I mean, wow. Wow.

Because all I do is work really hard at New Job and write patterns lately...

the Lauren Jacket pattern is up and for sale! See the button to your right!

IMPORTANT NOTE: When I wrote up the pattern summary for Ravelry, I forgot to list the sizes! Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

** Sizes range from 32 to 54 inch bust!** Woohooo!

It's a very thorough, talkative pattern, based on measurements more than stitch counts. I've done a lot of thinking about how to instruct you to make the best-fitting jacket you can. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments! ENJOY!


P.S. I was in NYC this past weekend, so I can chat about that in my next post. I was with my mom and Beth theotherweaver, so there was epic shopping. See how Beth rocks the Grellow?

I didn't let her keep it, but I might just make her one.