HACKING THE HOLIDAYS
Not much knitting here beyond finishing up the gift socks mentioned yesterday, which later today will be given to the target recipient. I also posted a yarn review for the Schoeller/Stahl sock yarn I used.
(Please consider leaving reviews of your current yarn yourself, as a holiday present to fellow knitters worldwide).
I can in the spirit of ecumenicism born of our happy, culturally jumbled household recommend two non-knitting related holiday hacks.
First for Hanukkah (and Kwanzaa): Every kid is fascinated by the candles used in menorahs and other holiday candle holders. They burn quickly, and often being close together, act on each other to make strange melting patterns and drips – especially when “encouraged” by the viewer. And every kid who grew up with a menorah in the house will either admit to performing said encouragements, or by virtue of being watched constantly, not having the chance to do what he or she really wanted to do. But not every parent can hover over the candles for the entire time they are lit for eight nights straight.
Now devices are no substitute for parental supervision, but accidents happen in even the most careful household. Place your menorah on a shallow lipped pan (like an inexpensive jellyroll pan or in my case – the liner pan that came with a now defunct toaster oven) and fill the pan with about a quarter inch of water. Drips will fall into the water, and won’t weld the menorah to the table or counter top. Should your offspring be too helpful and a candle come loose from its moorings – it will fall harmlessly into your mini-reflecting pool and be extinguished.
Second for Christmas trees: Fighting one’s way underneath the lower branches to water the thing is a major pain. I cheat. I float some packing peanuts or crumpled aluminum foil on top of the water so I can see the level while still standing. I also take a tube or pipe (in this house, the unobtrusive brown extension tubes from our upright vacuum cleaner) and wedge them into the tree holder’s bucket area. I use some twist-ties to anchor the tube against a branch. The tube remains there as long as the tree is in the house. Then when watering time comes, I take a watering can and pour into the tube until I see my floating markers rise. No bending, no needles in my hair, no overflows.
PEARLS AND PURLS (BUT NO SWINE)
We celebrated Hanukkah this weekend past in our own style. Fried foods are traditional. We did crab cakes. Not traditional by a long shot, but tasty none the less.
The Resident Male, finding himself at the fish shop buying the crab was tempted by some beautiful Bluepoint oysters. So he brought home four as a special grownups-only treat.
So there we were, happily slurping down our excellent oysters, when I thought I found a bit of shell. Not uncommon in oysters opened by amateurs*. But it wasn’t shell.
It was a pearl.
A natural pearl. Far from gem grade, but round and pearly enough to qualify, even though you can see a bit of the gravel that inspired it sticking out from one end.
I’ve put my tiny pearl next to a strand of cultured pearls for size comparison. I’ve joked about finding a pearl, and have known it was remotely possible. But I’d never heard of anyone actually finding one. So what to do with my inferior but extremely lucky pearl? Wear it for luck, of course. I’m thinking of getting a tiny silver charm in the shape of a cage to keep it in.
And I’ll probably make the traditional latkes tonight.
As far as knitting goes, I’m trying to zip through the remainder of a pair of socks, plus get a start on the foraging cap (in the style of a Liberty or voyageur’s cap) for my re-enactor friend. I’ve got a nice hand-spun wool fingering weight single, in a color sort of between forest and teal, with a touch of black. I would have preferred a barn red, but the red I had was heathered with too much white and from a distance read “pink.” Shown here are my larval beginnings (I’m working on the area that when finished will be the facing in the earband, plus the too-pink yarn. Gauge here is between 5.75 and 6 stitches per inch. I’ve got 130 on the needles, and am getting a band big enough to fit a 23″ circumference head. There’s some allowance for stretch and the hat will be double thick at the earband, but I don’t want to make it so tight that the wearer will get a headache. You can see just a bit of provisional cast-on peeking out at the bottom of that dark green wiggle:
Other than that, I am finishing up yet another pair of gift socks. This one from Schoeller+Stahl Fortissma Colori/Socka Color, color #5.
* We follow the safer Julia Child oyster method (learned while watching her on TV). It involves identifying the hinge and using the pointy end of a bottle opener to dislocate it. Then using a thin, sharp knife – winkling it into the opening made by the unhinging and running it around the oyster inside to scrape it top and bottom from its shell.
HALF BAKED HOLIDAYS REDUX
If you’ve been reading along here for a while, you might remember I’ve mentioned this family’s holiday cookie fixation before. Ten kinds. Every year. (I do give most away to co-workers and friends rather than let us eat them all ourselves). This year’s list is a mix of first time experiments and family favorites. It includes:
- Chocolate chip cookies – the classic, but made with mini chips and pecans instead of walnuts, slightly smaller than their non-holiday brothers. Mostly from the official Toll House recipe printed each year on the bag of chips (although I do cheat and use non-official chocolate).
- Peanut butter cookies – my kids would shudder in horror if I left these off the list. Done with crunchy peanut butter, just for fun. Otherwise it’s the standard from Joy of Cooking
- Buffalo rum balls – a version of the classic crushed cookie bourbon ball, but done with rum and cocoa, rolled in cocoa. Our variation comes from a recipe published in the Buffalo, NY evening newspaper some time in the 1960s
- Sugar cut-outs – the iconic holiday cookie. This year we get to use the Hannukah cookie cutters. Also I put lemon zest in the batter, and mix the icing with lemon juice instead of milk or water
- Oysters – a family invention. A hazelnut spritz sandwich cookie, filled with dark chocolate ganache
- Linzer cookies – New this year, from the King Arthur website recipe collection. Mine have little leaf shaped holes, that being the smallest cookie cutter I had on hand to do the center hole.
- Chocolate crinkles – Also from the King Arthur website. Killer chocolate flavor, fantastic texture. We use extra cocoa instead of espresso powder. My kids call these “Earthquakes” because the white sugar outside flaws and cracks in baking to reveal chocolate fault lines. I made these the first time two years ago from a very similar recipe sent by a friend and they’ve become favorites. (Hi, Kathryn!)
- Almond/cherry biscotti – Another new one. I’m cribbing this recipe together from several sources, including a basic biscotti recipe in the always wonderful Baking with Julia book. This is instead of the Panforte which although excellent deserves a break after a two years running appearance
- Lime cookies – Again a new experiment. This one depends on my finding sour salt (citric acid) locally. My grandmother used it to make her stuffed cabbage and to restore the shine to aluminum pots and pans (boiling them in a bath of water and sour salt). Another King Arthur website find.
- Pecan sandies – A family recipe, basically a nut-rich shortbread, rolled in granulated sugar and topped with a pecan half. These tend to alternate appearances with Mexican Wedding Cakes in our roster, as both are pecan shortbread type cookies.
I made a lot of progress this weekend past. I’ve got two cookies left to bake – the biscotti and the lime cookies. Plus I have to fill the oysters and Linzer cookies, and the kids get to ice the cut outs.
In other news, knitting did get done. Here you see the second of my two emergency baby shower gifts blocking on a balloon. The Regia 6-ply Crazy Colors has a relatively long repeat, so it makes wide stripes on both booties and hat. The white sections and broad yellow welting (including the tips of the I-cord bootie laces and hat bow) however are done in another well-aged leftover.
I also managed to get another couple of inches done on my ribbed leaf pullover, and complete about half a sock of other holiday gift knitting. But more on those tomorrow.
KNIT ANGORA BONDAGE CUFFS
First off, I want to warn and/or reassure everyone that there is no actual content anywhere on this site that relates to today’s subject line.
That line is however one of the many Google search topics that have landed people at this site. I’ve got several visitor statistics compilation tools attached to wiseNeedle. Some come as part of the hosting service package provided by the website ISP, some came with the dasBlog software The Resident Male used to build this new home for String. Between them they provide an interesting profile of visitors here, including some of the stranger ways they arrived. Now I can’t see from where exactly any one query originates, so please don’t worry that I know the topic above emanated from your individual computer or account. But I can see that someone on one particular day went to Google, typed in that phrase and wound up here.
Why? Because that person did a search that turned up pages that listed one or more of the words in that phrase. Knit I’ve got. Angora, too. It’s even possible that on the day in question, I mentioned work on the ribbed cuffs of an ongoing project. That’s three out of four hits on the admittedly unusual search phrase, so the seeker saw a listing for this site near the top of the probability of relevance sorted results page. (There are lots of ways to avoid this problem by targeting your searches with more precision. Google’s own tutorials are a good place to start).
Still, the search and visitor logs can be fascinating. I’ve seen a recent surge in traffic from Japan. Apparently the Kureopatora’s Snake Scarf has hit mini-fad status over there. I can even trace some referrals back to sites that show pictures of newly accomplished snakes nestled in pages full of text I haven’t a hope of reading. (Translation software helps some, but not much).
Most searches however are understandable. In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen them for
- free knit gift patterns
- spool knitter cow
- how do i make a swatch
- strickfingerhut Australia
- Montse Stanley
- Forest Path Stole
- Visio Stencils
- Solve for values of X
- Upscale beanie weenies
and some for yet another topic that appears nowhere on this site: “knit pattern g string pasties.”
My conclusion from all this – Knitters are looking for lots of information. And some of them lead far more exotic lives than mine.
On my own knitting – I’m not quite surfaced from deadline hell. I’ve had just enough spare time to tend to processing in yarn reviews and answering advice board questions. I have an inbox full of personal notes to answer, plus a couple of questions to answer that appeared here as String comments. Apologies to everyone who has waited so patiently, wondering if I’d fallen off the edge of the world. I’m still clinging on, and hope to climb back fully by the weekend.
SIGH
I am still mid-frazzle with work deadlines, and will be so for the bulk of the coming weekend. I have to say I came home last night too tired to knit, or even think about knitting. I have a pile of stuff that needs doing, but no get up and go to get up and get done.
For example, I have to finish off my Wave scarf. I’m up to the point where the ends of the edging need to be grafted together, and the hole that developed just after the start pf the edging where my yarn broke needs to be mended. I’ve got the Spanish Hat to plot out. Another table is in need of a protective runner. There are holiday socks to be started. I do have a head start on some gift knitting this year, with several scarves and sock pairs knit in idle moments lagered away against need.
There are also some long-standing residents of my Chest of Knitting Horrors(tm). Halloween arrives each and I feel them haunting me. I generally try to finish off at least one in November/December. In particular this year is the Rogue pullover in the dragon skin texture stitch pattern I started for Elder Daughter. That has had its front partially unraveled in a knitting accident (comic but annoying in retrospect). I need to figure out what the heck I was doing, rip back to a stable point and move forward.
And then there are the various other stitching projects I’ve been thinking of lately, curtains and the like for the house. Plus the figuring out what enlightening or entertaining knit-related articles I should be posting here, and working on the wiki (which is languishing as well for want of time.)
But I’m too harried right now to do much more than think of this pile of what is supposed to be fun work with anything else besides a lingering and wistful guilt. So apologies here. No enlightenment, no entertainment. Just a whiny blogger’s typical post full of self-indulgent sighing.
KNIT REPAIR
Today I document a Good Deed.
A co-worker, all puppy eyes and pleading, brought his favorite sweater to me yesterday. He bought it in Ireland, and practically lives in it all winter. He’d caught the elbow on something sharp, and cut a strand. And then the snag started to run. He asked me if I could fix it.
The sweater is of good quality, rustic finish wool. It looks like it was knit from two strands of sport or guernsey weight. The seams are machine-sewn, and there’s a nice “commando collar” – double thick ribbing, inset in a V, with a low turtleneck finish and center zipper. I’m not a machine knitter, so I’m not really up on what can and cannot be done using one, but the cables are not deeply embossed. They’re all formed by traveling stitches rather than multiple-stitch cable crossings.
Still, it’s a particularly nice and obviously beloved item. So I brought it home to fix.
Fixing hand knits with runs in them should be second nature to most knitters. First, you want to identify the break. Then if a run or ladder has developed, you want to spot the bottom-most good stitch that sits below the run. That’s the one that needs to be secured, and the one that you’ll use later in the repair. In this case, I secured it temporarily with a safety pin so it wouldn’t ladder down any farther.
If the yarn has broken, the ends need to be secured. Since this is a nice, sticky, traditional finish wool, the stitches left and right of the broken one hadn’t raveled side to side. (A plus for working with real wool). I reinforced them gently on the wrong side with some darning yarn of the same color, taking care not to let my repair show through to the front. Then I smoothed out the lumpy ladder, separating the rungs. Obviously there was one rung missing – the one that would have been formed by the broken strand. I laid some long stitches across that spot with my matching darning yarn until I had approximately the thickness of the original yarn built up.
Then I took a crochet hook and starting with that stitch at the base of the run, I re-formed the knitting stitches. I did this by pulling each rung through the stitch below it. Luckily this particular repair occurred in a plain stockinette area. I didn’t have to deal with crossed stitches or purls.
Once I had re-built all of the stitches, I had one top stitch that needed to be secured. Again I was lucky. This particular column of stitches “dead ended” at a traveling stitch cable. I used my darning yarn to take a tiny stitch, securing the loose loop to the side of the cable at the point where it would have been eaten by the decrease that formed the cable’s movement.
Here’s the result (not that my lousy photography skills and a charcoal gray subject make it any easier to see):
The formerly broken bit is in the top center of the sleeve that lies across the body, roughly below the zipper slider. You can’t see it, but take my word for it – the repair is totally invisible.
So, today’s morals are:
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Don’t toss damaged hand-knits in a corner in despair. You can use your knitting-developed skills to rescue some of them. and
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Ease of repair down the road is yet another reason to use the best quality materials you can afford.
SOCK DEMISE AND MORE SNAKES
While I’m still under deadline pressure here and have not gotten to the Spanish Hat, I do have some knitting-related musings to report today.
The first is sock yarn wear. I have knit pretty much the same sock in terms of fit since shortly after I began knitting socks. This is especially true for socks knit with sock yarn or fingering weight yarn. I’ve also stuck to a group of sock yarns that are a mix of washable wool and nylon – the standards, Fortissima, Socka, Regia, and Melienweit – all major labels and not house brands or knockoffs. And I’ve not changed the way I care for them. I still do the soak, spin, air dry thing rather than subjecting them to more stressful full machine washing. AND I am always knitting more, increasing the numbers of pairs I own, so that individual pairs are worn less frequently.
So why then are my socks wearing out faster?
This is a big mystery to me. I have several pairs of Fortissima and Socka socks that are pushing their 10th birthday, and were among the first I knit. They’re fine. A bit floppy, but not significantly abraded or worn through. I have other socks knit in the past year that are already showing holes at the ball of the foot.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between yarn maker and sock failure. Nor does the failure seem to be related to gauge, since all the victims were knit on the same size needles.
So. Is anyone else experiencing this? Or is it just me…
The second is a product of the need to do mindless knitting. I started another Snake Scarf, knit from an extravagance – Schaefer Yarn’s Helene. This yarn is next-to-skin soft, with all the luster of silk. It is however an Aran weight/light bulky weight single, and like all singles spun from soft yarns, has a tendency to split. I suspect that it will also catch a bit. But it’s lovely stuff, and giving the scarf away will be difficult to do. I can’t identify the exact Schaefer color combo my Helene is (I bought it over a year ago and lost the tag), but it’s mostly navy and raspberry, with hints of brown. The color repeat is however quite short, and does not produce the eye popping striped effect of longer color run yarns. (I’ll be posting a yarn review of the stuff soon).
Still, the subtle mottled effect doesn’t fight too badly with the scarf’s basic wiggly shape or stitch direction, so I’m pleased. On another note, I see that my original write-up of the snake scarf’s beginning is flawed. I’ll be correcting it later this week from my new working notes. Apologies to everyone who has been challenged by it. On the bright side, I only got one note from a confused knitter. The thing is so dead-simple that most people appear to have taken the error in stride and weren’t tripped up by it.
NOT GONE, JUST SWAMPED
One of the problems of writing a knitting oriented blog crops up when I have little or no time to knit. I’ve got a pile of ideas and things that are in process. Both sit, unattended. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends this week, consumed by work-related deadlines and kiddie holidays. My knitting languishes.
Now I have to say that I’m not so addicted to knitting that I break out in withdrawal symptoms when denied access. I can say that I miss my hour’s relaxation in the evening, tinkering away with string. But with luck, this too shall pass – although probably not for several weeks. Processing in yarn reviews and answering questions on the wiseNeedle advice board take precedence over idle rambling here. So please bear with me. String isn’t dying, it’s just overtaken by life.
REDACTION AND LIFE INTRUDES AGAIN
On the pattern redaction, Karen suggests that the 1892 pattern is the traditional Print o’ the Wave Shetland lace knitting motif documented in several places. The best example of it is in Sharon Miller’s Heirloom Knitting. The Eunny Jang wave stole pattern I just completed has a variant of it, too.
I reply that this pattern, although clearly of the same lineage, is different. It employs no double decreases, and minimizes the side to side movement of the wave element. I’m on hold noodling it out, between work-related deadlines and holiday preparations with the kids, I had no time to myself yesterday.
On the serendipitous end, the kids are finally old enough and use-specific tools have gotten safer enough to let them loose to carve their own pumpkins. Except for he icky scooping out the innards part (and rescuing the pumpkin seeds for toasting) they did them entirely by themselves this year.
So on hold right now are my Spanish hat; the repair, finish and block of the Wave stole; finishing the decipher of this pattern; plus beginning my holiday gift knitting. I have promised six pairs of socks plus several other small pieces as yet to be determined.
WHY (ALMOST) NO KNITTING GOT DONE LAST NIGHT
Smaller Daughter and I had fun last night building her robot pumpkin. She’s named it “Seven of Patch”. Today it heads off to assimilate the third grade pumpkin parade.
It was also a sewing night. The same daughter has her heart set on being a pirate this year. Most of that costume can be scrounged up from things around the house. But she needed a puffy white pirate shirt, and it had to be done before Friday (more on that below). So I hauled out my ancient 1962-vintage Elna SU (bought used) and clanked away. Even so a small bit of knitting did get done after I was finished wrestling the jamming bobbin case into submission. I managed to do another five inches or so of edging on the Wave scarf. I’ve got about a foot more to go and then I have the joy of fixing that nasty skip and run waaay back at the beginning.
Not tonight however. My kid-friendly workplace has invited employees children in after school tomorrow for in-office trick-or-treat. Employees are encouraged to dress up. I have tonight to figure out something that’s either easy to put on quickly or is not so distracting as to negate any possibility of actual work getting done before the kids arrive.
String-Or-Nothing 