This week was beautiful. Everyone I saw talked about how beautiful it was. The perfect autumn day, so bright, so lovely. The sky was begging to be photographed for a calendar page. Then, in the last 48 hours, the temperatures took a nose dive and snow flurries started to invade the air every so often.
So here we are, less than two weeks before Thanksgiving and ready to enter what I call “the tunnel” — a Wisconsin winter, from which one only truly emerges the following May. Sometimes the end of May or the beginning of June. We haven’t put the plastic over the windows yet and we missed our best opportunity to move the unused bicycles from the garage to the basement, but I have already made chili once and hot chocolate twice. Extra blankets have been added to the beds.
All I want to do on the weekend is curl up in the Big Green Chair and read books, but it turns out that what I really need to do is read books and articles about trends in higher education, write papers for grad school, lay out newsletter pages for my congregation, and read my Hebrew books. (Not books that are written in Hebrew, but books that teach me how to read Hebrew. True Hebrew literacy is way beyond the blue horizon right now.)
And apparently I need to wash dishes, lots and lots of dishes. If the hot soapy water weren’t keeping my hands so warm, I would consider switching to paper plates. Two sinks-full of dishes washed after dinner, then a mug of hot chocolate, then it’s time to crawl under all the extra bedding and dream until the alarm goes off.
Knitwise, I found some stash yarns that looked like they would go together well, and on Wednesday I cast on for a garter-stitch wide scarf. I had two skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease in Avocado and one skein of an unlabeled yarn of the same weight in a muted gold that one might call Harvest Gold, if one grew up in the 1970s. A vintage-vibe Packers scarf it is!
To ensure that I would use up as much of the yarn as possible, I decided on a simple pattern that would use it in proportion. So, after casting on 30 stitches, I knitted four rows of the green to two rows of the gold (two ridges to one ridge). I’m carrying the extra color yarn up the right side, so I’ll have just two ends to weave in at the start and two at the finish. I’m not sure that I have a full skein of the gold yarn, and of course I didn’t weigh the yarn before I cast on, so I might measure off some of the green yarn to set aside for fringe and see how things look at the other end of the project.
The ball band on the Wool-Ease calls for a US8 (5mm) needle and I’m using a US9 (5.5mm), so it’s producing a squishy, drapey fabric instead of a stiff one. So far it’s been a good project to work on while watching F1 sessions off the DVR. When I’m watching a live session as I did this morning, I have to be careful not to tighten up on the tension. (It was an exciting race, and our favorite driver won! I had to set down the project from time to time, and I’m not sure I touched it at all in the last ten laps.)
As it happens, after knitting on the project since Wednesday it is now 8.5 inches wide and 11 inches long. Those measurements seem familiar….
I also purchased two knitting patterns this weekend. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve purchased a pattern.
Knitcircus got me with their weekly email newsletter, and on Saturday morning I bought the pattern for the Thornberry Cowl, designed by Bug Richardson Selig. I liked the look of it in the sample photos, but the part that sold me was the opening phrase in the description: “A simple and quick knit….” Oh, Bug, you had me at simple. Quick is just the icing on the cake. (Or the cupcake, if I’m pretending to watch my portion sizes.)
Another factor may have been that I already had a cake (there’s that word again) of the very yarn specified for the pattern, though it isn’t in one of the colorways that they were suggesting. At this time of year they’re promoting their Christmasy colorways, but a few years ago they also promoted Hanukkah colorways. It was in 2019 that I purchased a skein of Festival of Lights. I didn’t have a plan for the yarn, but I wanted to support the effort.
Let’s face it; there are only so many Hanukkah-themed colorways that are possible to dye up, and I [may have] bought both of them from Knitcircus. (I can’t find the ball band for the other cake, but guess what! The yarn is blue and white.)
Then, this morning, I was concerned about the warmth of my hands as I was doing some electronic page layout work. I did a Google search for fingerless mitts and came across a picture of the Tree of Life Fingerless Gloves pattern at KnitPicks, designed in 2010 by Jenny Williams. The pattern is sold with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes but was designed with KnitPicks Telemark Peruvian Highland Wool. No worries, I probably have some of each. It only takes 100 yards to knit up a pair on US3 (3.25mm) double-pointed needles.
Pattern purchased, yarn in stash, needles in inventory including a cable needle, somewhere. I got this. Warm hands for the win.
Chocolate Sheep 