WHISTLING GIRL KNITS

Fitful spring weather is all the more exciting when you’ve ventured out in your socks to count the blossoms that have formed on the blueberry bushes and to check whether the carrots are sprouting. (They are!) Down comes the first spatter, but isn’t that a hint of rainbow forming? Where? Why? We shelter on the neighbors’ porch, improvising seats among the firewood, the six of us crafting silly sentences of words that rhyme with stump, talking about sun and rain all at the same once, squawking odes to the plush fur and convenient stature of Corgi dogs, speculating on the pleasures of Meyer lemons in cocktails. (They make a splendid whiskey sour, it turns out, and simple syrup made with coconut sugar is a perfectly good idea. You want an ounce and a half of whiskey, an ounce of Meyer lemon juice, and less than half an ounce of the syrup. We don’t own a shaker so we just dropped in a couple of ice cubes and stirred. You won’t be sorry if you do the same.)

This was Monday. We didn’t talk about the tragedy with the littles amongst us. (Ada happened to have selected, that morning, a beautiful shirt with ABC’s on it from a new batch of hand-me-downs: BOSTON RED SOX.) But in the face of all that’s been wrong with the world this week, that convivial moment, happenstance in the golden light amid the raindrops, was especially good.

This is Kate Davies’s Deco, and I mostly love it. Neither of these photos reveals its chief flaw, which is that my hips are either not where I think they are or they aren’t shaped the way I imagine or both. And as a result I’ve got a hip-shaped pooch of fabric several inches above my actual hips. This is despite having lengthened the body of the cardigan by a couple of inches, anticipating that I have a long torso and wanting coverage to the tops of the jeans I usually wear. And it’s happened to me before… my much-loved-anyway Amanda cardigan has the same problem. What I should be doing for a cardigan this length, apparently, is either to cast on fewer stitches so I don’t have to decrease more than a couple of times to reach the narrowest circumference or to begin the decreases immediately and just space them farther apart. Lesson learned. (Maybe.) I could also use a couple of hook-and-eyes at the bust, but I’m waiting until my post-nursing days to see if that’s still necessary.

But I am in mad hot love with the design, this color, and the yarn itself, which I snatched up at the Madrona Retreat in 2012. It’s from a little shop in Port Gamble, Washington called The Artful Ewe. Heidi Dascher owns the shop and dyes on a number of lovely and unusual bases. Her batches are small… I think I bought all there was of this color, and as you can see by the shortened sleeves, I could have done with a sixth skein. Artful Ewe doesn’t have a web presence for sales, so you pretty much need to visit in person or find them at a show, but this is a base yarn called Argentina, a blend of Polwarth wool and silk. I could knit it every day for the rest of my life. And worked at the tight gauge Davies calls for in this pattern, it should wear very well.

Deco was done in time to wear to Madrona this year—I sewed the vintage glass buttons (from the awesome selection at Happy Knits) on the train to Tacoma—and has been in steady wardrobe rotation. (It’s surprising how many colors hot coral red goes with.) If I knit it again, I think I’ll do a standard button band with button holes. I won’t deny the flash of bright ribbon facing is fun, but sewing that sucker so that both sides came out even was a bear. I did one side three times to get the rib to match reasonably well without bunching in places, no matter how well I thought I’d pinned it. Elizabeth Zimmermann was opposed to ribbon facings on the grounds that they won’t stretch with the knit fabric, and although I can see a way to use this to one’s advantage—to stabilize the back of the neck and shoulders, for instance…my Blue Thistle could use a dose of this treatment—I think I stand with her (as on so many other points). And stitching on all those snaps as well as the buttons…it’s a good thing I had a hard deadline and a lot of motivation to finish for Madrona, or Deco might languish yet in the work basket, all but done.

For the hard-core knitter looking for details on the experience of working from this pattern, I’ll refer you to my Ravelry notes. I’m really happy with my defeat of the slipped-stitch rib’s tendency to row out, and I did encounter an oddity in the sleeve-cap shaping, both of which I discussed in my notes.

Hiking with small people is hilarious. How, oh how, did the pioneers cross the continent with their little children staggering off into every clump of stickers because the tufty grass is such unpredictable footing? We didn’t make it very far along Powell Butte before the troops sat down on the track and demanded lunch, but what a glorious adventure it was all the same. Thanks to my friend Robin for the picture and the company. Thanks to the weather gods for the gobsmackingly lovely spring. Thanks to the city of Portland for the huge backhoes and to the Department of Defense for the fighter jet fly-by and to the horseback riders for sharing our trail. The day held everything a couple of two-and-a-half-year-olds could want.

It hasn’t been as quiet around here as you’d think from the blog activity. Lightroom went on strike because it was feeling so outclassed by my fast new computer; I finally caved and bought the upgrade so I could unearth these pictures from a month ago, when my eight-month-old was making his first real headway under his own steam. It’s tough to capture a crawling boy in low light with a fixed lens! (And sorry about his slimy nose. Poor guy is finally feeling better and there are now days when I go a whole five hours without wiping someone’s drippy snout. Don’t let the door smack your @$$ on the way out, Winter.) But perhaps these shots are particularly apt for the lack of focus I’ve been feeling across realms of late. It’s time for Blue Garter to go into the chrysalis and emerge as something better. The content won’t change a lot, but I’m feeling out a new name—Blue Garter began as a play on words when I was schooling my fingers to the craft of knitting and also planning my wedding, eight years back down the road now—and a new sense of purpose that I hope will freshen up this log of my life for the next decade. I want to be my own handywoman in the construction and maintenance of the new site, so my progress may be a bit like Jolly’s at first. (Though if I can move on to the equivalent of balancing on my knees and reaching for the high shelves just one month on, I’ll be chuffed!) Blue Garter will stay up for a while as I work, and I should be able to feed you tastes of the extraordinary Portland spring and a couple of comical shortlegged people in knitwear now that the camera-computer relationship is off the rocks. I’ll smash the champagne over the nose of my new vessel with the publication of the Pomander cardigan. And now that I’ve written all that in public, there’s nothing for it but to plunge in and swim, right? Here we go!

Come on, spring time! The fabric is Kelly Lee-Creel for Andover Fabrics; it’s called Storybook Lane Flowers.

This one is a button eater. I am going to need some very enticing props—better than the stuffed dinosaur on wheels I planted right in front of him—if I’m ever going to get a decent picture of his Tomten jacket.

One large carton contains the innards of Granny’s desk, which spanned a whole room with large windows from which she could watch the cardinals and wild turkeys and chipmunks and all the creatures of the Connecticut woods about their business in the leaf litter. There are large boxes of “boilfast” thread (I tested each wooden spool to winnow out the rotten ones and take them to my children’s school, where they’ll be put to creative use) and assorted buttons (I smiled at the good—cunning tiny badminton birdies carved of wood—and frowned at the bad: large handmade pink ceramic freeform shapes that strongly resemble feminine anatomy I shan’t mention on the internet). There is an ivory mechanical pencil printed “On To Alaska With Buchanan;” Professor Google tells me a Detroit coal merchant named George Buchanan led expeditions of young people up north between 1923 and 1938…was my grandfather one of those adventurers? There are ancient knitting pins—and I use the old term because pins they are. My modern needle gauges haven’t enough zeros to tell you just how fine they are. About the diameter of a standard paper clip, some of them. And folded into a stack of fabric squares was a girl’s needlework sampler. From 1796.

What does one do with such a treasure? It’s in poor shape, full of holes and bleed marks (the green dyes must have been particularly difficult to fix), badly faded on the front side, with much of the text simple vanished where the black thread has disintegrated. The most tantalizing details, the girl’s name and her age, are lost forever. Miss -bottom, we’ll have to call her, which isn’t a very dignified moniker for an artist. But the year stands proud. 1796. Twenty years after the Declaration of Independence. (But is this sampler even American? Granny’s family was half English, so perhaps not. And would an American girl have stitched crowns on her sampler? Someone out there probably knows enough about the iconography of the time and the needle arts to tell me.) I don’t know how to begin to preserve this piece of history… clearly not folded in quarters, but I daren’t even try to iron it out now.

At some point the little wheels began to turn in my mind. When I was at Bowdoin College I encountered the photography of Abelardo Morell. At the time he was working with books and maps as his subjects. I was hooked. Seriously, go click through his gallery. I’ll wait. Don’t miss this one near the end.

And now I’ve started to wonder if there might be way to translate this venerable piecework into another medium. Sadly, I don’t have Morell’s skills with a camera. But when I turned my lens to these threads and looked closely, I found fairy tale beasts…

… and allegories: beware, little girl. The fabric is frayed. You are standing at the raveled edge.

There is something so touching about the human imperative to impose beauty and order on an uncertain and often brutal life. The verses this girl chose, stitching each letter so neatly and minutely, framing them with a fretwork of flowering vines and an exuberance of embroidered blossoms… I looked them up, relying on the salient phrases I could decipher to lead me to the origin.

“LORD, I confess thy sentence just, That sinful man should turn to dust; That I e’er long should yield my breath, The captive of all conqu’ring death. Soon will the awful hour appear, When I must quit my dwelling here: These active limbs, to worms a prey, in the cold grave must waste away; Nor shall I share in all that’s done, in this wide world beneath the sun.”   –The Works of Philip Doddridge, Volume 5, Lesson XXI, On death

In 1796, how many people had this child already lost? How many playmates dead of fever, how many aunts or cousins in childbed, perhaps her own brother or sister tucked in the earth after accident or illness? It grieves me to think of someone her age calmly (and, it must be said, with a fine eye for typography) working those resigned phrases, feeling their weight as she must have done. And yet I have to admire her gumption in juxtaposing those somber reflections with that fanciful botany. The other passage she chose was from James Thomson’s 1726 poem “Winter:”

“Father of Light and Life! thou Good Supreme! / O teach me what is good! teach me thyself! / Save me from folly, vanity, and vice, / From every low pursuit! and feed my soul / With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure; / Sacred, substantial, never fading bliss!”

(Our Miss -bottom sensibly reigned in the punctuation.) Knowledge, conscious peace, morning glories, and exquisite little red deer against the cold grave. Wise child. I will treasure your tiny stitches.

I used Oceanwind Knits BFL Fingering, remnants from my Pas de Valse. I love this yarn. It is much more softly spun than almost kinky BFL fingering weight you’ve probably seen indie dyers offering as sock yarn. (I love that stuff, too, as it happens, but think Oceanwind’s base makes a nicer sweater if you don’t need it to wear like iron.) Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ BFL Sport would be a good alternative, although it’s a bit heavier and you might need to knit a size down on a larger needle. I think Pomander would be glorious in The Fibre Company’s Canopy, too… I might take the chance to finally try knitting that stuff after years of fondling it in yarn shops. A more tightly spun sock yarn would yield a different look—less halo, more pop to the yoke motif—that could be very pleasing, too.

Mia didn’t know what flavor of baby she’d be having, so I tried for Generally Cute rather than Gendered Cute. As it happens, wee Margaret is a girl, but I think her sweater looks pretty great on my own strapping lad, too. (You’ll notice I went with girl-wise buttons, but honestly I think gendered button placement is silly for anyone these days, especially babies. I’m told the left vs. right conventions originate with gentlemen buttoning themselves vs. ladies being buttoned by maids. But no six-month-old gentleman is going to be buttoning himself, and it’s only easier to fasten someone else’s buttons when they’re placed on the right side of the cardigan if the buttoner is right handed, anyway. I say put the buttons wherever you like.)

Jolyon can’t sit reliably without a spotter yet, so I tried to get his sister to prop him up for some clear shots of the front. Here’s the best photograph that approach yielded:

To be fair, she only has ten pounds’ advantage. And he’s kind of a flailing handful when he’s excited. The cardigan is a bit snug on my big boy, you’ll notice. But this is the 3-6-month size he’s wearing, his 6-month birthday was on the winter solstice, and he’s a large specimen, so don’t judge the fit by these pictures. I was kind of amazed it fit as well as it did… three cheers for stretchy knitting!

We four say welcome, Baby Margaret! You landed a fine family and a knitting mama (I happen to know there’s a super cute pair of owl mittens waiting for you in a couple of years)… and that’s a fair start in this world.

January 2 brought us a rare snow flurry, and this time I was quick enough to bundle the bairns out of doors before the tiny flakes had vanished entirely. We tried to catch them on our tongues. (You’ll have to take my word for it that there actually were snowflakes, as the photographic evidence would suggest otherwise.)

One of my hopes for this winter is to get up to the mountain at least once so Ada can taste the joys of snowballs and -men and -angels. (Also I suspect I’d be missing out on a rite of parenting passage if I didn’t have to whip a toddler back out of her cold-weather gear in time for a dash to the potty.) It’s one of my only regrets about our temperate, sea-level home, that there isn’t a real winter. My New England blood makes me pine for ice skating and skiing and snow shoeing. (I’ve never even been snow shoeing, but I’m convinced I’d love it.) On this day, it was excitement enough to scamper about our bare yard with tongues—two human, one canine—lolling. Baby Jolly, hastily swaddled in several layers of wool, took it all in and didn’t judge.

(Pikku-Pete cap still fits! Mama will be so sad when it doesn’t.)

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