recent and future knitting projects

Clearly I've lost the habit of blogging. The boys are growing quickly, and I feel keenly aware of the passing of time. These days when there's a choice between doing things and the recording of doing things, I tend to opt for the former. I don't even have the patience to document the processes; S now uses my digital camera, while I take spotty pictures with a phone.

Yet I appreciate having this log of life and projects over the past five years. Without it, for instance, I wouldn't have remembered that it was a full three years ago (!) that I bought the yarn which finally became a pair of socks.

Making Waves sock pattern by Pam Gordnier

When I had finished this project, S asked me to make him a necktie. He wanted it in navy, and he wanted it in seed stitch. This pattern worked perfectly.

My favorite part, however, was adding the keeper loop in the back. S chose his Maker Faire exhibitor wristband out of the ribbon box, thus reinforcing all my tendencies to hoard bits of material that "could be used for something."

Next up is another request from S: a cardigan with cables and a shawl collar. He's given the nod to this pattern. Let's hope it's not another three years before it's finished.

a day in carmel

"If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:

Perhaps of my planted forest a few

May stand yet..."

                      ~"Tor House," Robinson Jeffers

Image via Wikipedia

Hawk Tower at Tor House, Carmel, California

Our annual trip to Monterey changes up a little every year. This year we spent a full day in nearby Carmel, precipitated by the fact that S was now 12 and could finally join a tour of Tor House. Tor House is poet Robinson Jeffers' handbuilt home on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. We have been waiting years to be able to do this and were not disappointed. Unfortunately, cameras (and even handbags) are not allowed on the tour, so I only have a few outside shots to share.

It's quite amazing to think of Jeffers writing all morning in his Hawk Tower, a place S deemed "Harry Potter-ish" for its turrets and hidden staircase, then spending the remainder of the day hauling and setting huge pieces of granite as he extended the house from one tiny cottage to a walled compound with multiple additions. He also planted over 2000 trees (alluded to in the poem above) along the property's edges. This was a busy man.

The grounds also incorporate pool table slate, ship ballast, and discarded marble from a remodeled bank; as well as old statuary, a portion of the Great Wall of China, and other exotica from the Jeffers' and their friends' travels. These occasional insets of random material give the house a sense of surprise and wonder on top of its gorgeous natural beauty and cozy simplicity.

More surprises can be found in the town of Carmel itself, where Hugh Comstock's twee little cottages are sprinkled throughout the downtown neighborhoods. In fact, many of Carmel's homes are similarly designed to be quaint and original (and...expensive).

"Hansel"

We ended the day walking around Point Lobos, home to Monterey Cyprus trees and orange algae.

I'd miscalculated my knitting time on this trip and stopped by a yarn shop thinking I could start a new project. The store's ball winder was broken, so this did not happen; but I couldn't resist a skein of custom-dyed yarn the owner had commissioned to reflect the colors of the beach.

Why don't all local yarn shops do this? I'm thinking the colors here would be tomato red along with other agricultural colors like green, gold and deep brown. What are the dye colors of your area?

little stockings advent calendar

Remember these? They were the reason for my very first blog post, as I wanted a place to post the pattern.


Lovely and artistic Sam left a comment suggesting making 24 of them into an advent calendar. This year I decided to do just that.


Knitting during music lessons and at other spare moments, I eventually made some revisions to the pattern and turned it into a printable .pdf file.


The file can be found here.


The original goal of the pattern was to be able to knit up something quickly. But it's easy to get bored doing the same thing over and over so in the end, I traded a little speed for some variation: striping and stranding, duplicate stitching and basketweaving. With last year's trial versions thrown in, there was soon a good-sized pile.

And at Michael's, we found something to hang them that seemed made for an advent. Twenty-four to a pack!

Here's how they are hanging—I think you can barely make out the dates scribbled at the top of the clothespins:

And here's all 24 of them, waiting to be filled:

I'd love to hear about (or better yet, see) your advent calendars, homemade or otherwise. Please feel free to link to your photos or blog posts in the comments.

elizabeth zimmermann

Image via Wikipedia

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

~Elizabeth Zimmermann 

Today would have been Elizabeth Zimmermann's 100th birthday. If you're a knitter, EZ is likely a familiar name. If you're not a knitter, Elizabeth Zimmermann is still worth knowing about, in the way that all innovative people transcend the boundaries of their fields.

There was a period when I was never without a knitting project in my hands. I tore through hats and socks and miniature sweaters. I began to knit preemie infant caps for the local hospital, simply to justify my need to twirl yarn through sticks. I don't think I was probably a very friendly person. Talking wasn't of interest, unless it was talk about knitting.

The same was true of books, and it was my good fortune that the first knitting book I ever read was Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmermann.

The book begins:

     Most people have an obsession; mine is knitting.

Your hobby may be pie-baking, playing the piano, or potbelly-stove collecting, and you can sympathize with my enthusiasm, having an obsession of your own. Will you forgive my single-mindedness and my tendency to see knitting in everything?

Carvings and sculpture remind me only of Aran and other textured designs; when I see a beautiful print my first thought is how it would adapt to color pattern knitting; confronted by a new fashion, I immediately start drawing in the air with my forefinger to see if it would suit itself to knitting, and if so, how—which way the grain should run, if the shape could be knitted in, and what stitch would be most effective.

So please bear with me, and put up with my opinionated, nay, sometimes cantankerous attitude. I feel strongly about knitting.

You can imagine how my heart jumped reading these paragraphs. This was a person whom I would have actively chosen as a friend: funny, articulate, passionate, and charmingly self-deprecating. She advocated wool over synthetics, keeping a loose gauge, making swatches, using the humble garter stitch.

Most importantly, Elizabeth Zimmermann advocated experimentation and play. If she made a mistake, she would look at the possibilities in it. In this way, she came up with many new techniques and designs—including the i-cord, circular sweater knitting, and a mathematical system of sweater design—yet she refused to credit herself, certain that somewhere in time, someone else must have come up with the same idea. Instead, she called what she did "unventing."

Recently I discovered some of her dvds through our local libraries. Like her books, they are a mixture of ingenious technique and a complete lack of pretension. The camera catches the cat sneezing as Elizabeth and her daughter Meg break into laughter; it pans over to watch her husband Arnold working in the shed. Playing the dvds is like sitting down at a neighbor's house—a neighbor who just happens to be a master knitter.

And this neighbor also wants to encourage you to be your best. She tells you, "...be your own designer. No two people knit alike, look alike, think alike; why should their projects be alike?" She's unfazed by the bizarre way you hold your needles, the fact that somewhere along the way you lost several stitches, by the glaring mistake in the second row of your nearly-completed sweater. It's all knitting, knitting is what she loves and like a mother who sees only the best in her children (Elizabeth had three), she thinks it is just fine and always knows how to mend the trouble.

Improvise, but observe what happens. Develop technique without becoming a slave to it. Love what you do, and do what you love. Have confidence—just don't let your ego run wild. It's knitting, and it's more. Read into Elizabeth Zimmermann what you will.

  To repeat myself—experiment.

           ~Elizabeth Zimmermann

playing with yarn, part 5 (knitting rhymes)

Knitting is rhythmical, and one way to help keep rhythm while learning is to knit with a rhyme. When my older son was young, we learned this one for the knit stitch:

Under the fence

Catch the sheep

Back again

Off we leap

At that time we knew of no purl rhymes, so we made up our own:

Yarn to the front

Dive down deep

Catch a pearl ("purl"--I know, ouch!)

It's yours to keep

(Sometimes it's hard getting that loop off the needle in four short syllables.)

A quick search now turns up all sorts of knitting rhymes, not only for knit and purl, but also for Continental and English knitting. I think all that matters is that the rhymes you use are easy to remember and intuitively fit the motions of knitting and purling. A good rhyme helps cement the physical memory; the less you have to think about knitting, the more fluid and enjoyable it will be.

playing with yarn, part 4 (making knitting needles)

I believe children in Waldorf schools routinely make knitting needles before they learn to knit. It brings a little bit of woodworking into a fiber-based activity, and it is calming to sand and finish. Calm is a good thing to have when knitting!


There is also a sense of accomplishment in having created one's own tools before beginning. When you've put time into polishing your tools, you are more invested in using them with care.


A 1/4" dowel will make size 10-1/2 needles. A 3/8" dowel gives you size 11 needles. Both of these are for use with bulky yarn and are easy to learn to knit with.


Mark and cut the dowel to a size you like--I think 12" works well, but I've seen children's needles that were shorter, and if you are making something wide, you may want a longer size.

You'll end up with two pieces of dowel roughly the same length.

After this, you need to make points. You could whittle--

--but an easy way is to use a pencil sharpener. You don't need, or even want, your knitting needles to be pencil-point sharp, just tapered.

In theory, you could knit with pencils themselves, although you'd be getting lead all over your project. So let's stick with the dowels, which are now sharpened and ready to sand.

We start with 100 grit sandpaper and gradually move up to 320, sanding until the wood is very smooth.

When you are finished sanding, you simply need an end cap of some type so that the yarn won't fall of the end of the needles. Pink pencil cap erasers work just fine, although you'll want to glue them so they stay on. K and E glued acorn caps to theirs:

S rubbed his needles with beeswax and orange oil, then sculpted balls from fimo clay, baked them, and glued them on:

These were dyed with colored stains from Ikea, coated with tung oil, and capped with Lego pieces that had been drilled out:

I'd love to see other examples of homemade knitting needles, and will gladly add any photos you send to this post.

playing with yarn, part 3 (spool knitting)

Apparently this is also called French knitting and corking, terms which I am unfamiliar with. I can't call it anything other than spool knitting because when we were kids, my mom literally took old empty wooden thread spools and hammered nails into them for us to use.


We didn't save any of these knitting spools, as they were considered temporary pastimes like folding gum wrapper chains or playing cat's cradle with a piece of string.


Some years ago, though, my dad was cleaning house and found the doll on the left in the photo below. I believe this belonged to my sister, as I have no recollection of ever using it. Despite the fact that it was a commercial product, not homemade, it also uses finishing nails to hold the yarn.

The spool in the middle is a more recent product known as a knitting mushroom. It fits in the hand well and has large, U-shaped hooks on top which don't snag the yarn. It contains the remains of someone's old project, testament to how a well-made object adds to the pleasure of an activity.


On the right is one of the last knitting spools my husband made one year when we took down some branches. He drilled a hole through the center and added nails like my mom used to.


The yarn, and eventually, the piece of knitting, will go down through the hole in the center. To cast on, you make a series of loops around the nails. Then you bring the yarn around the outside, as seen in the last photo.

Once you have the loops on, all you will do is continue to wrap the yarn around the outside, bringing the loops up and over the yarn. Remember finger knitting? It's exactly the same principle. It's as if your fingers were curled into a circle instead of laying out flat.

Here's how it looked on another day, after we'd gotten a little farther:

Spool knitting makes ropes, belts, handles for bags, drawstrings and lassos. You can make lengths of them to add designs to your creations: snails, snakes, spirals, flowers. You can spell out your name in different colors. Many years after playing with spool knitting, I came across Elizabeth Zimmermann's I-cord and realized that it was a two-needle method of spool knitting. Funny how all these things come back around.

playing with yarn, part 2 (finger knitting)

It's all but impossible to do something and photograph it at the same time. I'm grateful that my son is willing to go through the sequences of what we do in our yarn group so that it can be shared. This doesn't capture the feeling of sitting and talking, leaning over and learning from each other, but hopefully it allows someone else to get a glimpse of what we have been doing lately.

Finger knitting is easy, tactile, and requires no equipment. A lot of young children (mine included, in years past) seem to enjoy seeing how quickly their piece grows. There are two methods that I know of.

Finger Knitting Method 1

Although the following method is sometimes called finger knitting, I call it finger crochet. It's a way to make a chain stitch without a hook.

First, the slipknot:

Once that is done, you continue to make a series of slipknots using your fingers. Just reach through the loop, grab yarn from the long end of the slipknot, and pull it back through. Continuing this, you create a chain:

Adding a crochet hook can feel a little unwieldy at first. It helps to remember to turn the hook up when catching the yarn, and down when pulling the yarn through.

Finger Knitting Method 2

This method is much closer to knitting as we think of it. You cast on by weaving the yarn around your fingers--first one way, and then back again. Once you have yarn on both sides of both fingers, you will bring the yarn straight across all four fingers as in the last picture of this sequence:

Now make your loops. Bring the yarn that is wound around your fingers up and over the yarn that is going across the fingers. It helps to bend your finger so the loop can just slip. Bottom yarn over top yarn, like so:

Continue with each finger in turn. Bring the bottom yarn over the top yarn for the pointer, the middle, the ring, and the pinkie fingers. Then you'll pass the yarn across the palm side of your fingers again and bring the bottom yarn over the top for the pinkie, the ring, the middle and the pointer fingers. Back and forth, forth and back. It goes pretty quickly:

In about a minute, you'll have a piece of knitting that looks like this:

Some years ago, one of my boys made scarves for his aunts using this method of finger knitting. They are narrow, but they knit up so quickly that it's possible to do a nice long scarf in a single sitting. If you need to, you can also transfer the loops from your fingers on to a large knitting needle until you're ready to pick up again.

Knitting is nothing more than making yarn into fabric by creating a series of loops, and the best demonstration of that is knitting directly on your own fingers and making the loops with your other hand.

playing with yarn, part 1 (handspinning)

We've started getting together with friends to do things with wool. The ultimate aim is to teach knitting to parents and kids who are interested, but there's so much around knitting that we decided to do some lead-in activities first.


Because we live in an agricultural county, all of us have seen sheep in fields, watched them get sheared, and touched unwashed wool. We pulled out clean, carded roving and rolled it around in our hands to see what happens when it's twisted. The drop spindle is just a tool to help with that twist, and it can be made very simply with a toy wheel, a short length of wooden dowel to fit inside the wheel, and a brass cup hook:

You put it together like this:

And screw the cup hook into the top. This is a top whorl spindle, and it spins a little faster than the bottom whorl type.

That makes for a tighter, thinner yarn.

It also makes it a little easier to get the hang of spinning, I think.

After the spindle is assembled, you need a leader to attach the wool to. We used a loop of cotton string slipped around the shaft and hooked under the cup hook.

K showed us that an easy way to start spinning was to roll the spindle along one's thigh.

Or you can stand up and set it twirling with your thumb and forefinger.

I'm not really a spinner but I often think that someday when my life settles down, I might become one. It's very soothing and somewhat hypnotic to watch wool pull and twist into yarn. It also made for a fun first day of our yarn circle.