Of course, most knitters fall into both camps on occasion, but I have come to realize that I am, without doubt, a process knitter.  I don’t mean to say I am unconcerned about the finished product – I am as aware of the Christmas deadline as any other knitter – but I am one of those people who is unhappy with the finished knitting unless it is just right.

If you are a knitter, you will understand that this noble impulse can be a royal pain in the ass.  For instance, my latest not-quite-right project is a pair of baby socks (rav link) I’m knitting for my niece/nephew who is going to arrive shortly.  This is what they look like right now:

Not bad, eh?  I finished turning the short-row heel (I’ve never actually done one of those before) and felt quite clever, when I noticed an interesting instruction.  Instead of making a reverse stockinette stitch stripe down the middle of the sock, which is what I had somehow ended up doing, I was supposed to be knitting every other row completely so that there would be a garter-stitch stripe instead.  You know, like the pattern’s own name even says?

Here’s my dilemma now: I am very close to being done this sock.  Since it’s a baby sock I have only a couple more inches til the toe, and then I’m halfway to having a present finished.  But, as you probably know, garter stitch has different qualities than stockinette, the first being that garter stitch does not curl and pull in like stockinette does…like the stripe on the front of these socks does.   I’m sure that when the socks are on, they will look fine.  There is still an interesting, textured stripe down the front.  My brother and sister-in-law are not knitters, so they will likely not know the difference.

But I can’t do it.  I have to rip the dang thing out.  Why?  Well, first of all, I refuse to make one sock incorrectly and one sock correctly, and I don’t think I could stand doing it wrong twice now that I’ve noticed the mistake.  And secondly, any time those socks got mentioned again, or I saw a picture of the baby wearing them, I would have a second of pure distaste for myself for having done such a shoddy job.

What about you? Are you a product or process knitter?

Oh, Knit Night was fun all right.  I walked in, and there they were – knitters!  A bunch of them!  All sitting around a table and knitting together!  I was nervous, of course, as I always am when I get into a new social situation, but the ladies there couldn’t have been nicer.  They welcomed me in, gave me a chair, and asked all the right questions about what I was knitting.  And, hello, it was held in a yarn shop.  Even if all the knitters had been jerks (which none of them were, I assure you), I would still be surrounded by yarn.

Actually, perhaps it’s the prevalence of wool-fumes that makes knit nights so fun.

Anyway, I naturally didn’t bring my camera with me, so I have no pictures…which is probably for the best as I just met all the ladies last night.  It might be a bit soon to be posting their pictures on the internet for everyone to see.  I can, however, show you what I brought home with me.  (You didn’t think I’d come home empty-handed from a yarn store, did you?)

I got some double points:

I’ve only just started using them; I was making A’s mittens and I realized that as partial as I am to it, the Magic Loop method is not intended to be used for each and every piece of circular knitting on the planet.  And maybe I should stop being lazy and learn how to use double points, especially since you can buy them at the dollar store, but not circulars.  (I know, support the yarn shop, but at $1.29 per needle set it is an unbeatable price).

And, of course, I got some yarn:

Meritwist Hand Paint from Punta yarns.  It’s 100% wool, it feels lovely, and it is destined to keep me warm this winter.  If I can stand to wear it instead of staring at it all day.

This does not, sadly, mean that I am better at sewing than knitting, just more experienced.  I have had some issues with clothes patterns in the past.  They never seem to fit me and they always build in way too much ease and, although I know how to alter finished clothes, I’m usually too frustrated by that point to bother.  I know I could learn to make my own patterns etc, etc, but for right now I’d rather focus on sewing things with perhaps a few less curves and angles to take into effect.  (I didn’t start out knitting awesome sweaters; I knit washcloths, so I assume taking a similar tack with sewing will help).

With that in mind, I have decided to make a quilt!  “Wait,” I hear you say. “That’s not that simple or that easy to sew.”  I know.  I know.  Will it help matters if I tell you it’s a quilt for Little Bear?  I am making it just big enough to transition from her crib to a toddler bed.  When she gets to her “big-kid” bed eventually, I’m assuming that both she will want something a little different than her baby quilt, and I will be jonesing to sew something.

My plan is just patchwork quilt made up of a simple pattern of squares.  Nothing fancy.  I just have to be able to cut and sew in a straight line, which I am proud to say I can most certainly do.  The only thing that remains to be seen is if I actually finish the thing.

Have you ever tried to make something you weren’t entirely sure you could finish?

Since I don’t have a job out in the workforce, it can be hard for me to gauge whether I’m actually getting things done at a reasonable rate.  Should I congratulate myself on getting the dishes done today or be frustrated because I still haven’t cleaned out the fridge?  When do I schedule breaks for myself, and how long is too long?  And what counts as “work,” anyway?  Are those super-moms you hear about really crazy, or do they just happen to know how to organize their time?  Am I just being lazy?

Yeah…a lot of neurotic questions, I know.  It’s tough for me to answer any of them because being a mom and taking care of our house is hard and it’s a lot of work, but there’s no boss to tell you when you’re doing things right, no obvious rewards and punishments, and only one coworker (in my case), who isn’t always available to relieve me anyway.

My job at home here is never going to be nine-to-five.  I will never be able to punch out.  But does that entitle me to laze around during A’s naps instead of putting away the laundry?  I don’t know.  Some days I feel like I’m working at high capacity, getting everything done, and other days my energy hovers just above zero.  And maybe that’s okay.  Maybe I get to take an average.  I certainly hope so.

In lieu of knitting pictures, I would like to show you the new look I have today, but to do so requires a bit of backstory, which goes like this:

When I was in high school, I discovered the joys of hair dye.  I’m a natural ash blonde, which makes my hair extremely easy to dye any colour under the rainbow as there isn’t much natural colour to interfere with the dye.  I think I’ve been dyeing my hair off and on since I was fifteen.

A couple years ago I had a reaction to some drugstore dye and thought I’d try something else: henna.  Which cannot be bleached out and can take a long time to “take” with your hair.  I got tired of that and decided to try out salon dye.  We did the whole nine yards: strand test, waiting a couple days to make sure, etc, etc.  And it turned out fine.  Until I decided to dye my hair dark chestnut.

Because the colour I’d chosen was so much darker than my natural hair colour, they had to leave the dye on longer in order for my roots to actually be covered.  And I didn’t really think that was a problem until that night, when my head started swelling.  And swelling.  Eventually I could barely turn my neck or open my eyes; the reaction continued even a couple days past when I started taking the medicine I got in the ER.  (Fun fact: even if your head is twice its usual size they will still make you sit around for hours in the emergency room.  Do not forget your knitting).

So.  You would think I’d swear off dye forever after that experience, and that was what I wanted to do…but what to do about my ashy blonde roots coming in?  Simple, I thought, I’d get some henna dye or something that won’t hurt me.  I started looking around for more natural ways to dye your hair and found some I thought would be good.  Ammonia free! Paraben free! Peroxide free! All natural! Etc, etc.  I tried it out and my head seemed fine…until a couple hours later, when my neck started swelling.  And the spot behind my ears.

And so I did the only thing any rational woman would do when faced with the possibility of looking like someone used a bicycle tire pump on her face: I shaved my head.

Luckily I managed to finish the hat as well before getting tired of it, so my baby girl will be warm as can be.  However, due to a recent warm spell, I cannot show you a modeled picture…somehow I don’t think she would be too fond of the set if I forced her to wear them under the hot sun.

Anyway, so I appear to be concentrating on organizing my house, which is almost a joke as organizing mostly consists of moving piles of stuff around and putting away the one or two things that actually have a place.  Yarn, of course, is all hidden away safely, as well as any other knitting materials not currently being used, as it helps keep awkward budget questions to a minimum.

No, I suppose the place isn’t that bad.  Still, we do have a lot of stuff, some of which we’ve earmarked as definitely going to Value Village and other stuff that’s just…lying around.  And neither of us seems to have any idea what to do with any of it.  We don’t really want to throw it out, but we don’t know what we’re going to do with it here, and cabinets are expensive so…just leave it on the table, I guess.

So I’m muddling through.  I did pick up my needles and do a few stitches though, so perhaps I will have more to brag about soon.

Baby mitts looking out the window, longing for snow

They are not quite done yet.  I still have to duplicate stitch the paw print onto both of them, but the actual knitting is done, which means that I no longer have to suffer with guilt for being a terrible mom and letting my baby be wheeled around with cold hands.

You may be wondering why I opted to put a thumb on mittens for a thirteen-month-old who, besides not having much dexterity, has small enough thumbs that they don’t stay put anyway.  Well, I’ll be honest – it was in the pattern, so I did it.  Would it have been easier to leave the thumb off?  Undoubtedly.  But in addition to these being my first baby mittens, they are my first mittens, period, so I wanted to get some skill with thumbs.

Hopefully I can get a good picture of the recipient modeling her new mitts (and soon, her new hat too!).  If she stops crawling around our entire house for a second, I promise I’ll do my best to catch her.

First off, I finally managed to finish up Irish Coffee:

It looks a little better on – the band at the bottom is perfectly snug and doesn’t pull in like it looks like it would.  I made it a little longer than the pattern specified because I wanted more of a tunic for over leggings.  It’s fabulous and its only flaw is that it is too warm for our current weather…although now I’ve jinxed us and we are going to get a dump of snow tomorrow.  Ho hum.

Now, that is the only real FO that I can think of.  The only recent one, anyway, so  let’s see what I still have on the needles!  First, I have a pair of socks for my mom’s birthday:

I’m making the Retro Rib pattern from Interweave Knits.  I’m liking the pattern so far – it’s easy to memorize but still not boring, and the yarn (Arequipa by Estelle) has a lovely feel, so I’m enjoying the project.

Next up is a baby sweater for Little Bear:

It doesn’t look like much now, I know – just a fairly simple stockinette-stitch sweater.  Usually I make things a little fancier with baby knits since the canvas is small enough to make daunting patterns a little easier to tackle.  But I’ve discovered that approach works best before you have your baby, not after.  What do I like doing now?  Cranking out miles of stockinette.  I can do that during any free interval in my day because there’s no real pattern to memorize.  Thus, Little A gets new, handmade sweaters, and I get a chance to calm down and knit myself back to sanity.

That sweater has been temporarily stalled, however, in favour of attempting to complete this:

I must have more time to knit than I think.  Yesterday morning I left the house with the baby as per usual to go on our morning walk.  Little A was bundled up as best as I could make her but as the chillier weather came upon us a bit suddenly, I did not have a hat/mitts waiting for her.  As soon as we got home I began trolling Ravelry for a good hat/mitt pattern because I am a knitter and if my baby is cold it’s my own damn laziness at fault and by the end of the day I had a hat (sans chin strap), one mitten, and half an ear.  So much for never having time to knit.  And I’m hoping to get at least the other mitten done today; she has hoods on her jackets but mitts are the real need here.

I also have a sweater for the husband on the needles, but, being a sweater for a man, there is not much visual interest to the stockinette piling up, and it’s not small enough to have visible growth like a baby sweater, so that one can wait for a slow news day.

What was I even doing that I wasn’t blogging?  Life.  Got married.  Watched my baby learn some really neat new things.  Learned how to live with a person I thought I really knew (turns out I had no idea…but it worked out in the end).

And so it goes.  I kind of stopped knitting there for awhile anyway – too busy learning how to live my new life to have time for too many extras, I’m afraid.  But it appears to have returned with a vengeance, and with it, a desire to document it for myself at the very least, and hopefully for others who enjoy the same things I do.

So here I am again.  In usual haphazard fashion, I have no photos to show you tonight, so I will have to leave you with plain text for now.

Obviously since I’m writing this on a Sunday morning, Easter Sunday is not our important family tradition.  My family’s always gone out on Good Friday, first to church and then for a walk and out to lunch, and that was exactly what we did this year.

It was good, better than I had thought it might be.  I’m still young enough to have holdover feelings from when I was a teenager, not wanting anything to do with family – so sometimes these gatherings don’t go off too well.  But somehow, it ended up being a pretty good day.

I haven’t been to church in months.  The church I used to go to is about an hour’s ride away by bus, which was fine when I was single and childless, but I do not intend to get up even earlier than I already have to, to attempt to pack up an eight-month-old and brave the Ottawa bus system on a Sunday morning.  However, Good Friday is family tradition day, and obviously it would not be the same without going to church.  So all of us carpooled and went to my sister and brother-in-law’s church.

Going to church was really good too.  I was a little surprised.  When I’m going to church consistently I start complaining about all the little things the church does “wrong.”  The service is too long or too short, the sound isn’t done right, I don’t like the songs…you know how it goes.  But since I haven’t been for so long, I didn’t notice any of that.  Maybe it was the fact that it was a very significant day for Christian churches, I don’t know, but  I really felt a sense of community that I find is often lacking.  I know a lot of people look down on those who only show up to church on Christmas and Easter, but I think if you’re only going to go twice a year, those are the times to do it.  Those two holidays, everyone has the same purpose and is celebrating the same thing.  It’s easier to be nice to people on Easter, I think.

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this.  I also realized how rusty my voice is from not being exercised every week (yeah I sing loudly in church.  Why not?  It’s more fun that way).  It actually cracked several times, which I was rather embarrassed about, but then Amy needed a nap so I didn’t have to face any potential critics, hiding as I was in the nursery – a small consolation.