Venus in the Closet

Venus has now been confined to the closet and is waiting for the weather to break before going out in public. The yarn is silk but it is a sort of fluffy silk that feels more like merino... lovely to knit with and I'm sure lovely to wear when it isn't 90 degrees out.

Here is a closeup of the lace pattern, complete with the white lifelines, before assembly and blocking:



I am almost sorry to be finished with her, since it was such an interesting pattern to knit and the yarn was so scrumptious.

And, speaking of scrumptious yarn, the Zephyr for the Mystery Stole 2 is also wonderful. As is the pattern. I have completed the first side of Part 3 and am extremely sad to have to leave it for the time being, since I won't be able to get the remaining clues while we are on vacation. It has been so much fun watching the pattern reveal itself that I'm not sure I can stand the suspense until we get back.



Meanwhile, I am trying to figure out what to take on the Baltic cruise. I have enough Zepyr to make another shawl but haven't decided which one. The Zephyr should be perfect for travelling, because it is very lightweight and scrunches up to almost nothing. Now that I am hooked on lace knitting I'd like to try something interesting, but will be out of range of help if I run into trouble. What to do??? For somebody who only started knitting two years ago (after a 20+ year hiatus) it seems pretty psycho to be planning my knitting for the trip even before I start thinking about what clothes to pack!

What I won't be taking: the cotton chenille baby sweater on size 2 needles that I hate working on. It is just stockinette, but it makes my hands hurt after just a few rows. I have to finish it before my granddaughter comes to visit in September, so there is a deadline. I have a feeling that I know what I'll be doing Labor Day weekend!

Just in time

Against all odds I managed to finish Part 1 of the Mystery Stole just in time for Part 2 of the instructions to be released. I had to stop for a few days to go down to Miami to visit my mother... lace doesn't make for good airport or airplane knitting since it requires so much concentration, and the complicated pattern means having lots of space to spread out. So instead of unpacking and doing the wash today I treated myself to a long knitting session, and here is how it looks now:


The photo doesn't do it justice, since one end of Part 1 is squished on a stitch holder – it is symmetrical both horizontally and vertically (but I wasn't willing to take the stitches off the holder for the sake of the photo). The next section will be knit from the bottom and then repeated at the other end. The yarn is wonderfully fine and soft... the whole thing can be mushed up into the palm of your hand.

As for airplane knitting, I took along a summer top that I started on the plane to Paris. I had finished the back and was planning to do the front and cap sleeves on this trip. Unfortunately, because of several extra hours in the airport when the plane was delayed, I finished it all before the plane eventually took off and had nothing to work on for the whole flight. I suppose I should have put it together today, but it was much more fun working on the Mystery Stole!

Venus: Vedi, Vidi, Vici

Venus is now complete! Well, not completely complete. It is officially off the needles, just in time to start the Mystery Stole (more about that below) since I had promised myself "Just Say No" to new projects until at least one was finished.

Here is Venus in her unblocked form, complete with dangling ends and lifelines:

The photo is a bit distorted because of the angle necessary to get the whole vest in the photo, but you get the idea. The yarn is Fiddlesticks hand-dyed Country Silk, and it is scrumptious.

This was my first real lace project, after doing several scarves. The instructions were extremely well written. There were charts, which I had never used before and found somewhat intimidating at first, but they were very easy to follow. The liberal use of stitch markers and lifelines kept me on track and I rarely had to do more fixing than pick up a dropped stitch between markers. It is knit from side to side, with a 16-row repeat, so I threaded in a lifeline at the end of every repeat. Even though I never had to frog it down to a lifeline, they came in handy for keeping track of where I was. Here are closeups of the lace patterns:




Blocking will have to wait, since I will be away part of this coming week and part of next week. But then it is too warm to wear it before fall anyway.

On to the Mystery Stole! I had already made four swatches in ivory alpaca to get it up to gauge. As you can see in my last post, the Penguin is looking at them dubiously, so I ended up buying a cone of the lace weight Zephyr (50% silk, 50% merino wool) that the designer was using. It was touch and go whether the yarn would come in time... I was itching to start, and if it didn't come in yesterday's mail I was going to have to wait until Thursday. But, miracle of miracles, it arrived late yesterday afternoon, just as I was about to dunk Venus in the sink! So Venus got a reprieve, and I started winding manageable-sized balls from the cone.

There were several false starts, not even counting the previous swatches. I decided not to do another swatch, since everyone else using Zephyr was using #3 or #4 needles, and I didn't have any #3's and would rather have it a little bigger anyway. I started on an inexpensive bamboo circular and after carefully marking up the charts, doing the provisional cast on, and putting in stitch markers, I did the first few rows. There were lots of booboos along the way... counting to 10 or 12 would seem to be a simple matter, but on the way back the number of stitches between markers would change. Aaaargh! And then the yarn kept catching on the join of the needle. Clearly it was meant to be frogged and restarted on the Addis I had once bought and never used. I was afraid that the Addis would be too slippery and stitches would slide off the needle too easily, but the snagging and catching with the bamboos was ridiculous. So back to the beginning!

By the time my eyes were announcing the end of the evening I had completed the first 20 rows of the chart:

...

This looks like it is going to be a beautiful design... but with 2 inches to show for an entire evening's work (with absolutely no distractions) it could be a very long process indeed.

And yes, I plan to thread in a lifeline before I do one more row!

Couldn't resist a mystery

For someone whose favorite genre of (junk) literature is the mystery, the Mystery Stole Knitalong was irresistible... even though I already have too many projects on the needles and had promised myself not to start anything new until at least one project was complete. The plan is for Melanie to post directions for a lace stole in six sections, one each week for six weeks. There is a Yahoo Group for the participants to discuss progress, questions, etc. as we go along. It sounds like fun, even though we won't know what the stole is supposed to look like until the end – but judging from Melanie's other designs, it should be a beauty.

We were give a head start to choose the yarn, do the gauge swatches, and cast on the first 99 stitches. Here the Penguin is watching over the four swatches as they are blocked...

The yarn is a fine ivory Superalpaca that I bought on eBay a few months ago. It took four tries to get it up to Melanie's gauge – I was actually hoping for a little larger so that the stole would end up bigger than specified in the initial specs. The first swatch is on size 4 needles, then 6's, 7's, and finally 8's.

I've already learned a few things. I cast off way too tightly, as you can probably tell from the swatches, and will have to devise a way around that. (There's only so much you can do with blocking!) I also tend to cast on too tightly but have learned to cast on with a much larger needle to solve that problem. This pattern calls for a provisional cast-on, which I learned to do from the excellent video from Knitting at Knoon. A provisional cast-on always sounded a bit intimidating, but it wasn't at all difficult and, in fact, I may adopt the crocheted cast-on on which it is based in the future. I've also learned (as if every knitter and pattern designer didn't already stress it over and over) how important it is to do a swatch. Or two. Or four.

A week in Paris

Not much knitting got done last week, other than on the plane. R had to go to Paris for a conference, and in an act of wifely devotion I agreed to go with him. We were celebrating a BIG anniversary, and our friends D & L were also celebrating theirs, so the four of us went together, and while R was staring at blackboards the rest of us enjoyed walking (hobbling?) around Paris and visiting museum after museum.

Since I have been there quite a few times, it was fun to seek out places I hadn't visited before (in addition to -- not instead of -- pilgrimages to the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre). On Monday, our actual anniversary, the four of us went to visit the enormous and fascinating Père Lachaise Cemetery, where "everybody who is anybody" in French art, literature, music, and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries was buried.

On the same day, after a walking tour through the Marais section, we visited the new Mémorial de la Shoah, a beautiful memorial to the 76,000 Jews who were deported to concentration camps in 1942-44, of whom only 2500 survived. The memorial includes a wall of names of all 76,000, and has a huge collection of photographs, documents, and videos, everything beautifully displayed but also catalogued for serious Holocaust research. Our visit was particularly poignant because we found the names of L's father and other relatives on the wall.

The next day we dubbed "Gray Tuesday." All our attempts to absorb a little culture went awry. On our short list of "must sees" for this trip was Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, about 40 miles outside Paris. We planned to take the train from Paris and then a bus from the Vernon train station to Giverny. After taking the Metro (with two changes) to Gare St. Lazare, we discovered that the train schedule was extremely limited, with only two return trains, one too early and one too late. So back to the drawing boards. (Of course, because we weren't planning to visit museums that day, we didn't have a guidebook with us.)

First we headed down the Champs Elysées to the Petit Palais, one of the many Paris museums that has recently reopened after a long renovation period. There was a wonderful exhibit of the 3000 Years of the Art of Peru, beautifully displayed, but the building itself is just as interesting as the exhibits. Then off to the newly re-opened Musée de l'Orangerie at the end of the Tuileries.... Whoops! Closed on Tuesdays! After lunch in a nice little café we walked over the the Musée D'art Décoratif, one of D's favorites... Whoops! Closed Tuesdays! Sore of foot and weary of heart, we decided to spring for a cab back to the Left Bank to visit the Cluny Museum, not far from the hotel and home to the fabulous 15th century "Lady with a Unicorn" series of tapestries. Awful traffic, lunatic driver, but we got there safely. Whoops! Closed Tuesday! (We did eventually get to the Cluny later in the week and were not disappointed.) As we dragged ourselves back to the hotel we found a nice little jewelry store where D and I consoled ourselves.

Then back to the hotel, which was one of the small hotels on the Left Bank with a great location, adequate rooms, and a tiny elevator. The three of us got into the elevator, pushed the button, and up it went... for about 10 seconds... and then it came to a dead stop about 4 feet up. There we were, between floors, and nothing we did would convince it to start again. After we rang the alarm a few times, Mademoiselle behind the desk managed to put down her phone and come to help. She forced open the outer door, we pushed upen the inner door, and then by sitting on the floor we were able to jump down to safety. They had to call the "fixer" (who took 24 hours to fix it) and in the meantime we had to climb up and down 5 flights of stairs. Aaaargh!

The rest if the week was much better. We were really lucky with the weather, which was sufficiently overcast to keep it from being hot and we had no rain except for a few sprinkles. There were some real highlights: dinner with L's cousins at their home outside Paris; visits to the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay; and our eventual visit to l'Orangerie, with its incredible Monet Water Lilies panoramic paintings totally occupying the oval walls of two large galleries. It almost made up for missing the garden at Giverny where they were painted! Almost as an afterthought we went downstairs to see the "small collection of Impressionists" donated by the widow of art dealer Paul Guillaume... over 100 works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Modigliani, Derain, Soutine, and Picasso. What a gem of a museum!

Another obscure highlight was the Manufactures de Gobelins, whose history consists of 500 years of tapestries. By chance we discovered that one can still visit the ateliers of weavers who still weave magnificent tapestries on huge looms using historical techniques. One can no longer commission a piece – even assuming one could afford it – since the factory is now owned by the French government and the works created there are exclusively for government buildings or for gifts to foreign governments. They no longer make any of the old designs but only modern designs copied from paintings commissioned for that purpose. The entire tour was in French, so I missed a lot, but it was still amazing to watch people at their looms. The weavers have to serve a four year apprenticeship, and it takes several years to complete each piece, so these people have to be incredibly patient and immune to tedium!




And then the pièce de la resistance... the Opera! I've always wanted to see the old Garnier Opera House and never got there, even to tour the inside of the building. This time we made reservations two months in advance and got tickets for a performance of Gluck's Iphenigenia en Taurus. The production was a bit strange (why do they insist on setting old operas in modern times???) but the setting was extraordinary, as were the performances.

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What an incredible week! Art, music, great food, good friends... What more could one want??? Well, too bad R had to work for most of the week. Otherwise (if we discount Gray Tuesday) it would have been perfect.

Perfection is overrated

This time last week I was in a tizzy because of a dropped stitch in my fircone lace shawl. It didn't show up in its initial incarnation as a lumpy blob before blocking:









but then, stretched out for blocking, there it was:

After fiddling around with a tapestry needle and a spare piece of yarn I managed to anchor the stitch so that it wouldn't unravel. It hardly even shows... though to me it might as well have little red lights blinking all around it. The truth is that very few peope would notice it -- the lacy design and the slightly fuzzy texture of the alpaca do a pretty good job of concealing the imperfection. Even my weaver friend Maxine could't find it until I pointed it out to her. And why am I so fixated on perfection anyway???

I found a wonderful quote from Isaac Babel (How it Was Done in Odessa) on the subject:

If you need my life you may have it, but all make mistakes, God included. A terrible mistake has been made, Aunt Pesya. But wasn't it a mistake on the part of God to settle Jews in Russia, for them to be tormented worse than in Hell? How would it hurt if the Jews lived in Switzerland, where they would be surrounded by first-class lakes, mountain air, and nothing but Frenchies? All make mistakes, God not excepted.

How could this have happened??

Disaster has struck. I just finished my third lace scarf, washed it, set it out to block and discovered -- about 4 inches from the beginning -- a dropped stitch!!!! I don't know how this could have happened, since on the next row I had the right number of stitches. Maybe it was one of the times a few stitches slipped off the needle and, in picking them back up, I missed the actual stitch and picked up something else instead. Aaaaargh!!!!! Once it dries I'll try to mend it. Guess I won't be giving this one as a gift!

The Reluctant Penguin discovers Librivox!

Literature to knit by, and all free! Librivox.com provides books, poems, and short stories that are read by volunteers. I first discovered it via the CraftLit podcast, wherein a former English teacher discusses knitting, spinning, and assorted other crafts and introduces a few chapters of an audiobook every week. She is currently doing one of my all-time favorite books, Pride and Prejudice, nicely read by Annie Coleman via Librivox. Now that I'm caught up, I may just skip ahead directly to the Librivox version so I don't have to wait a week for the next installment!

So here's the scoop on Librivox. Anyone can volunteer to read... all it requires is a little time, a microphone, and free recording software. The literature is all in the public domain, meaning that it is mostly pre-1923, but that covers a lot of classic literature. The catalog is expanding all the time. The Reluctant Penguin got her feet wet with a few poems from Fables for the Frivolous by Guy Wetmore Carryl and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (still in progress) and then went on to read several chapters of Candide by Voltaire (still in progress). Some projects are collaborative, with different people reading one or several chapters of a book, and others are solo, with a single individual reading an entire book.

Knitting is much more interesting while listening to a good book, especially this time of year when everything on TV seems to be a rerun.

Thank you, Theresa

If you use the long-tail cast on method, you know the intense frustration of casting on 90% (or 80% or 70% or all but one) of your stitches and running out of "tail." Rip it out and start again. Aaaaaargh!!! Try doing it with a pattern that begins with "cast on 501 stitches." After 3 attempts, I finally gave up and joined another ball of yarn for the last 40 stitches... it still remains to be seen whether it will show when the sweater is finished.

Then one day recently I discovered a solution while browsing the Techniques section of knitty.com. An article by Theresa Vinson Stenersen on "Casting On" says:

Another good way to avoid this problem is by using two balls of yarn -- or both ends of the same ball of yarn -- joined at the slip knot. Just cast on one extra stitch and unknot the slip knot when you're finished casting on.

Why didn't I ever think of that??? It seems so obvious when somebody points it out! I don't even know why I was reading the article, since I have done a long-tail cast on since my grandmother first taught me how to knit, but I will never do it another way if I have to cast on more than about 30 stitches. Thank you, Theresa.

Two projects off the needles

Yesterday I finished my opera shawl. (I call it that because most of it was knitted while sitting in a wonderful 10-week "Opera Without Tears" course.) Yesterday was the last day of the class, and the shawl seemed long enough. Plus, the room was cold, so there was an extra incentive to bind off and throw it over my shoulders. There is enough yarn left to make some fringe -- I just haven't decided yet whether it needs it or not.

This week was a good one for finishing things. I also finished my second lace scarf from Elizabeth Lovick's Shetland Lace Workshop, this one the Horseshoe pattern. Just like the first one, this one metamorphosed after blocking from a blob of alpaca spaghetti to a beautiful scarf:




Next project: Summer Braids Cardigan from Cabin Fever. I cast on yesterday and knit a few rows in light blue cotton. Then UPS arrived with some scrumptious light green superfine alpaca I had ordered. The cotton looks nice for a summer sweater, but the alpaca is soft and luscious and it even knits up in the right gauge. What to do???

A tale of three swatches

Last week I started the Cotton Chenille Baby Cardigan for Gaia. It just wasn't knitting up the way I had envisioned. My original swatch knitted up exactly to gauge... 4 sts = 1" on size 6 needles. But the fabric was far too loose. Even the multicolor bauble trim looked funny. So I did another swatch on size 4 needles, and another on size 2's. After washing them it was clear that the cotton wasn't going to shrink enough to tighten up the fabric very much. So off to the frog pond with the back, which was almost finished. (At least baby sweaters aren't that big... it is much more painful to frog the back of an adult sweater!)

I'm going with the size 2 needles, though it isn't easy knitting the heavy chenille yarn on such tiny needles. While I was at it, I'm redoing the multicolor trim -- instead of baubles a plain garter stitch. Much easier on the fingers with this yarn, and I think it looks better. It's beginning to look like I knit the way I cook... the pattern is like a recipe, just a set of suggestions rather than commandments.

It was a busy week at the frog pond. While there I had to rip a whole 16-or-so rows of the sleeve of my Hanne Falkenberg Lastrada. It was my own stupid fault -- I read the chart wrong and knit two rows of the wrong color, and it was a long time before I noticed. The good news... they were sleeve rows with 70-something stitches, and not body rows, with 400-something stitches, or I might have thrown myself right into the pond!

My first Shetland Lace project

After seeing many photos of beautiful Shetland Lace shawls knitted by Maureen Taylor I decided a few weeks ago to give it a try. I started with Elizabeth Lovick's Shetland Lace Workshop (at Maureen's suggestion) and a skein of leftover blue Superfine Alpaca. (I won't even discuss the number of time I had to frog it before I discovered that the yarn was less likely to slip off bamboo needles.) It sure didn't look like much on the needles!

Everyone says not to give up hope... that once blocked, lace will take on its shape and the design will come through. I didn't' really believe it, but here are the results:

This is an extremely simple pattern (New Shell) ... I have already cast on for the next one (Horseshoe), which looks exponentially more difficult. Eventually I hope to be able to do a shawl, but that's like anticipating calculus when you're still in kindergarten!

OTN: Hanne Falkenberg Lastrada

When I first saw Lastrada I loved it, all the more so because it was available in large sizes. I couldn't wait until the kit arrived from Kangaroo in England, and when I opened it up, my first reaction was disappointment. The colors of the yarn didn't look at all like the colors on the screen. They were much more muted and earthy than the colors on my monitor - or, for that matter, the colors on the photo that came with the kit. What I thought would be blue (maybe because it was called "blueberry" ) was actually gray, and what I thought would be a light camel-ish is a very dark brownish yellow. But the colors seem to work together, so I plunged ahead.

My second moment of horror came when the instructions started with "Cast on 501 stitches." 501??? It wasn't a misprint - the sweater is made in two pieces, with the front, sleeve, and half the back on each part. You cast on the stitches across the bottom (front and half the back) plus the stitches that form the vertical front edge. The design is brilliant... but at no time could I visualize how this was going to fit together! Only after I got to the first sleeve and was struggling to figure out the directions was I able to try it on and see that it was going to work.

I'm still not sure I am doing the sleeve correctly. But I knit on, in the hopes that, like the main part, it will all come together at the end. Let's hope the frog pond is not in my travel plans.

Grandmothers knit...

One of the inspirations for starting to knit again was that my grandmother, Nannie Belle, was a fabulous knitter and made almost all of my sweaters when I was growing up. Except when she was cooking (which she also did very well), it's hard to remember her without knitting needles in her hands in those days. So when I found out that my daughter-in-law was pregnant I just assumed I had to start knitting baby sweaters for the baby. That lead to a number of friends asking me to make sweaters for their soon-to-arrive grandchildren, and then my other daughter-in-law had a baby, so more projects were lined up. Here are some of the things I've done in the past year:

(Left) Max, age 8 days, modelling his first sweater and hat knit by Nonna. Okay, so the the hat is a little big...








(Right)Here is Max again, about nine months later, in his Cable Patchwork Sweater (from Beautiful Baby). I wasn't used to juggling different balls of yarn at the same time and they kept getting tangled. It was interesting managing three different patterns with different repeats. Thank goodness for stitch and row counters!





(Left) When we found out that Gaia was on her way, the needles went back into action. I had found some pink baby alpaca on the internet but it turned out to be a darker color than I thought, and I made the same sweater I had made for Max using one strand of the baby alpaca knit together with one strand of white KnitPicks Palette. It is incredibly soft and has a slightly heathery look that doesn't come across in the photo.

When we went to Israel to visit Gaia, I worked on this blue poncho. It's too big for her now, but she will grow into it eventually. It is blue acrylic from stash and the trim is KFI Liberty.









The Dinosaur sweater from Bernat Kids is waiting for Max to grow into it. I had planned to make it from Knitpicks Wool of the Andes, but that isn't available in white. In fact, it turned out to be trickier than I thought to find 100% wool worsted in white, so I used Cascade 220 for the white and the purplish blue. Colors are really hard to match on the internet - I really thought I was ordering a light blue and was surprised when it turned out to be purple-er than it looked on all three of our monitors. Oh, well -- a dinosaur can't be too fussy about the color of its legs.

QUESTION: I am now trying to figure out which pattern to make next... It is Gaia's turn and there are about 8 different things that are candidates, including Anouk, a dress from Knitty. Have any of you had any experience with this pattern?

Knitting Projects Recently Completed

Here are some projects I have complete in the past few months.

This is a sweater I made from a faded old copy of the Leisure Arts leaflet, Seamless Raglans. I had made a few sweaters this way in the "olden days" and really liked the top-down approach with a minimum of sewing at the end. The yarn is hand-dyed wool from Weston Hill Farms. I was afraid I wouldn't have enough, so added some KnitPicks Wool of the Andes for the ribbing and a few subtle stripes near the top in a Fibonacci configuration. It is so
subtle that you don't really see the stripes.

It's really hard to take a picture of yourself through a mirror!



My first modular knitting project, the Multidirectional Scarf from Iris Schreier's Modular Knits. The yarn is KnitPicks Wool of the Andes and Memories. I wasn't entirely happy with my choice of yarns for this scarf - there isn't enough contrast between the variegated triangles and the solid/variegated striped triangles. Next time I will choose two solids. But there wasn't much I could do about it - I knit it on the plane to and from Israel in March, and there wasn't any other yarn handy.



I bought some really wonderful superfine alpaca yarn on eBay and then had to figure out what to do with it. The off-white was a strange shade, which looked a little greener than the photo on eBay - one of the hazards of buying yarn over the internet. But it combined well with the blue heathery yarn. Each section was knit using a double strand of the respective color.


This was the yarn that started my whole knitting renaissance. I bought it several years ago in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina, on our way back from Antarctica in January, 2005. (That's another story!) Quite a few people on the ship were knitting, and I wondered why I had ever stopped... When I bought the yarn I thought it was wool, but it seems to be a wool-acrylic blend, and the scarf is already starting to show signs of wear after just a few months.


The old and the new... The blue hat was knit in 2006 in wool I found with a half-finished sweater in the back of my closet. It had been sitting there for over 20 years. The gray hat is one I made for Roger at least 20 years ago. It is now ready to be retired.

What? You don't have a blog?

"What? You don't have a blog???" I guess it's finally time to join the 21st century and start my own blog. So here I am.

Why The Reluctant Penguin? As someone who is always cold but always finding herself in cold environments (like my house in the winter or over-air-conditioned buildings in the summer), I took on the nom de plume of Reluctant Penguin many years ago. It seemed like a good persona for my blog, especially after falling in love with REAL penguins in South America and Antarctica on several trips in the past few years.

My recent preoccupation with knitting (after a many-year hiatus) was another reason to start a blog. Several knitting blogs have served as sources of inspiration, encouragement, and assistance with a variety of projects. Maybe this one will be of some interest or help to other people!

My focus will be on knitting projects - though I may not be able to resist talking about our travels from time to time.