Backstage at the Nutcracker: A Mouse and a Sheep

Moira’s been going to the same ballet school since she was four, and all that time we’ve been dressing up and watching the annual Nutcracker Ballet put on by her school the weekend after Thanksgiving. We’ve seen costumes and scenery change from year to year. We’ve watched party girls grow up to become Sugar Plum fairies and Snow Queens. And Moira’s grown from a little girl decked head to toe in polka dots and costume jewelry watching the “big girl” mice battle the soldiers, to a fine young lady sporting mouse ears and whiskers herself.

Moira tried out for the Nutcracker the first week of September and was assigned the role of a mouse in the first act, and a sheep in the second act. She faithfully rehearsed every Saturday for months, and every night of the past week (except Thanksgiving Day) until 10 o’clock at night, and then the shows began. Now she’s almost done with all her performances. All her most loyal fans – family and friends – are going to the last performance tonight. I can’t wait to sit in the audience and watch Moira on stage.

I helped out backstage, and so was able to take a few pictures. Above is Moira with one of the soldiers, and below are the mice with their beloved Rat Queen (our ballet school is lacking in boys, so we always have a Rat Queen instead of a King).

The older girls who get parts that involve younger girls (the Rat Queen with her mice, the Sugar Plum Fairy with her angels, Dutch Chocolate with her little Dutch girls) all give token gifts to their young charges. Moira received Max the Christmas Mouse from her Rat Queen, and has vowed never to eat him. (She did fondle him so much through the packaging that his nose and cheese melted.)

And here’s Moira the little sheep. Apparently one of the benefits of the sheep costume is the capability to put ones’ knees inside the baggy body. There were sheep balled up all over the dressing room.

Our Nutcracker is a small-town production. We use recorded music rather than live, the backdrop for the Sugar Plum palace is shockingly ugly, and there are little mistakes in every show – and yet the sum is so much more than the parts. The costumes are so well done, and are improved every year, the older dancers do their own choreography and help the little ones, and through it all the spirit of Christmas shines. It really becomes a magical production. Moira has loved the experience, and I’m looking forward to the Nutcrackers of years to come, and of eventually watching Eva and Iris dance too.

I Promised You Entrelac

Since Euro Vest ‘09 has been in time out the past few days I needed a fun, easy, good-looking project with which to comfort myself and salve my wounded knitting pride. Enter entrelac. I took four balls of Noro Silk Garden (all of them different yet – I hope – complimentary colorways).

I found a basic entrelac scarf pattern here, and I did this.

There are a few simple and brilliant things I really wish I’d invented (or at least thought of independently). Icicle lights. Buttonhole elastic. And the entrelac technique. I tried to explain its modular perfection to my friends as our daughters ran wild played nicely in the living room and we knitted in the kitchen, but I suspect they’re more confused than enlightened, so I won’t attempt it here. I’ll just say it again. Entrelac. Brilliant.

Euro Vest ‘09 Bogs Down

Subhead: Kara distracts self with many, many other projects

Besides having no will power, which I’ve known about myself for years now, I’ve just discovered that I stink at knitting in the round. I know. It doesn’t make much sense to me, either. I’ve been converting flat patterns to seamless knitting in the round for over two years now. The knitting goes faster, and I’ve never noticed a difference in the quality of my knitting – until now, when I really wanted to make a nice, professional-looking sweater vest for my brother-in-law.

There must be something about the fingering-weight yarn I’m using for Euro Vest ‘09 that leads to uneven tension. I had no idea how rough things were looking until I reached the armpits a few days ago, divided the sweater in half, and began knitting back and forth on the back. It’s slower going for me, because despite trying really really hard to make purl stitches as quickly as I make knits, they’re just not as fast. But my knitting is so much nicer! It’s the opposite of what I would have hypothesized, frankly, and it’s driving me to abandonment. I can’t even bear to take a picture, so you’ll have to imagine Euro Vest ‘09 wadded sadly in the orange knitting bag, while the couch overflows with odds and ends of worsted-weight yarn and hat patterns. Oh, and some entrelac, but that’s for tomorrow.

As a consolation prize, here’s a finished hat. None of my children would model it for me while I took pictures, so the floor and my left hand reluctantly volunteered.

Specifications:

• Pattern: Lillehammer by Cider Moon/Yarn Zombie
• Yarn: Odds and ends of worsted-weight (Cascade 220 for the green, Patons for the beige, mystery dark brown)
• Needles: size 7 16″ circular, and size 7 DPNs
• Modifications: I knit 6 pattern repeats with a gauge of 5 sts/in

Life is Better with a Mustache

I was trying to put Iris to bed last night, and there was some absolutely ferocious giggling going on in the living room. I came out of the bedroom when she was finally asleep and found Moira and Eva taking pictures of themselves on the computer, using the silly effects of the photo booth program. They were sporting some excellent construction paper eyebrows, beards, and mustaches.

Recycling Your Knitting Part 1: How to Turn an Unfinished Sweater into a Hat

For those of you who may be haunted by a surfeit of unfinished sweaters, or even just one, I have a solution. A sweater is a big project, at times frustrating, at times intimidating, at times impossible to finish. A hat is not nearly so hard to make, and happily the former can be turned into the latter when all else fails. Of course, you could rip out the sweater entirely and begin a new project, but this is assuming the whole thing is driving you crazy and you’d just like a finished project for your pains.

I sometimes get requests from people to finish knitted things for them, which I try to deflect as much as possible. I don’t mind doing finish work or repairs for hire, but I resent using my precious knitting time to knit for pay. (Bad attitude, I know. Plus I’m not fast enough to make it worth while.) A few weeks ago a customer brought an unfinished sweater to the yarn shop where I work. Her mother-in-law passed away, and the unfinished sweater was her last work. Her family wanted me to finish it so they’d have a keepsake rather than a few balls of yarn and a quarter of a sweater body. However, the yarn needed to complete the sweater was missing from the bag and had been discontinued, making it difficult to purchase more. I looked at the sweater, which was an Icelandic style, knitted in the round from the bottom up, and suggested turning it into a hat so that the family would at least have their keepsake, though in smaller form.

Here’s how I did it. I ripped out the sweater body to the point where the hat decreases would need to begin. This left 5 inches of knitting.

I wanted the hat to be average size, so I measured 20 inches of ribbing, pinned it, and tried it on. It fit, so out came the sewing machine. I sewed twice down the legs of a row of stitches and cut the sweater at the next stitch over. I did the same to the stitches at the 20-inch marker. I now had a flat piece of knitting with the stitches secured at the sides by the machine sewing and live at the top.

I put the live stitches on two circular needles and worked the top shaping of the hat, using the wool I’d unraveled from the body of the sweater. Because this sweater was designed with increases after the ribbing it was shaped like a tam, so I used tam-style double decreases for the crown of the hat.

Next I used the mattress stitch to sew closed the steeked seams of the hat. (Please excuse the post-Halloween nail polish.) I stitched over the seam with a herringbone stitch just to make sure everything would stay in place. The seam is slightly bulky, but not visible or uncomfortable.

And here’s Moira reluctantly modeling the finished hat, which I washed and let dry over a plate, as you would a tam.

If your sweater has been made in pieces this process of turning it into a hat is even easier. Elizabeth Zimmermann observed that half of the body of an adult-sized sweater (ie the front piece or the back piece) is conveniently enough the diameter of an averaged-size hat. She was recommending that you make a swatch cap on half the total body stitches before beginning your sweater, but of course it works the opposite way too. You should be able to seam up the sides of the sweater piece, configure the top however you desire (if nothing else just run your yarn through all the stitches and pull tight, or bind off and sew together in a + configuration) and voila! A perfectly usable piece of knitting is recycled from something that was just sitting around making you feel guilty or sad.

Dyeing with English Breakfast

Although I am still meeting my Euro Vest ‘09 goal of 2 inches per day, I slipped up yesterday and knitted this little hat. It’s the Child’s Andean Cap from Charlene Schurch’s book Hats On!: 31 Warm and Winsome Caps for Knitters. I used some odds and ends of worsted-weight yarns. The white is Lambs Pride, the red I think Ida will recognize from Sam’s cabled sweater, and the teal and purple are Cascade 220. I used size 6 needles, got a gauge of 5 sts per inch rather than the recommended 6 1/2 sts/in, and it fits everyone in my family except the youngest child!

There was only one problem. It was an ugly hat. I knew going in I wouldn’t like the stark white in contrast to the bold colors, but I had a plan. I finished the hat, then I broke out the tea. I’ve been on a huge cheap tea binge lately. I keep thinking I should splash out on some high-quality loose leaf, but for now I drink whatever’s on sale at the grocery store. So out came the essential items for dyeing with tea: black tea, vinegar, a pot you don’t use for cooking (obviously tea is a safe dye, but there’s a chance that some dye could bleed out of the previously colored yarn and if it does it may contain chemicals you don’t want in your cooking pots), a stirring spoon set aside for dyeing only, and whatever you want to dye.

I put about two quarts of water in the pot so the hat wasn’t crowded. I used my usual scientific vinegar measurement and added one glug to the water. I tossed in three English Breakfast tea bags and the hat and began heating it to a simmer. I stirred frequently, and soon discovered that the tea bags weren’t as firmly fastened shut as one would hope. Out they came to be stapled into submission. I suggest doing this in the first place. (There are still some flecks of tea stuck to my hat.)

After half an hour the hat was a gorgeous golden brown. I took it out of the hot dye bath on the end of my spoon, plunged it into a sink full of hot water to rinse it, then rolled it up in a towel and stepped on it to dry it. Then I plopped it right on my head, damp though it was, and didn’t take it off for the rest of the day. It blocked nicely!

When I think of Andean color schemes, what comes to mind are the vibrant juxtapositions of neutral naturally-colored yarns and bright chemically-dyed yarns, which is recreated well here thanks to the tea. Anyone for a cuppa?

Euro Vest ‘09: 2 Inches a Day!

Spoiler Alert! Maarten, don’t look at this post!

Although my sister is an excellent knitter, she’s got some other big projects taking up her time these days – like knitting for a baby on the way and taking care of two small children and doing translating work on the side. So she’s outsourced a knitting request to me, and I in turn get to call it a Christmas gift for my brother-in-law. He’s requested a sweater vest, a fine-gauge, classic men’s sweater vest. I found the perfect pattern in British designer Erica Knight’s book Men’s Knits: 20 New Classics. The pattern is called the “Plain Vest” and it is plain, except for some fun full-fashioned shaping details that I’m really looking forward to. It’s just what Maarten wants (I hope). It’s a very Euro looking vest and I’ve been having fun imagining my Dutch brother-in-law wearing it to work.

I broke my own rule about buying the best yarn you can afford and got some Knit Picks Palette – because this time of year that’s the best yarn I can afford. I hope it wears well. The color’s a rich earthy green, but light enough to show off those aforementioned full-fashioned details. It seems like a flexible and versatile color that for some reason resists being photographed accurately. I had to adjust the color levels, and it’s still not right.

I made just two modifications to the pattern so far: I converted it to knit in the round until the armpits by adding the number of stitches for the front and back together, then subtracting four stitches for the selvedge. Since it’s seamless I’m adding a two-stitch cable where the side seams would be to give it some structure. This cable is so discrete it’s almost not there at all, and I think it’s a fun subtle detail.

I calculated that I need to knit about 2 inches every day to get this done in time to mail it off to the Netherlands, with a few other little goodies for Christmas. So let’s see: 292 stitches/round, multiplied by 18 rounds/2 inches = 5,256 stitches per day!?! Can that possibly be right? Please excuse me. I’ve got to go knit a few thousand stitches.

Sick Day at Home: Kid Crafts

It’s a sick day at home for us today. Moira and Eva are suffering the flu that’s wiped out the entire staff and student population of their school. It’s 10 a.m. and we’ve already used up all the tissues in the house and had to resort to toilet paper. We’ve also listened to one of our favorite stories on tape, The Wind Boy by Ethel Cook Eliot. And the girls are crafting like mad. It won’t be such a bad day after all.

Moira got her first handspun project completed. She spun up some of my Louet Northern Lights space-dyed roving on the student drop spindle a few months ago, and her lovely ball of handspun was just sitting on the sideboard – until this morning, when she designed and knitted this punk/funk wristwarmer. Nice work, Moira!

Eva’s been weaving. She’s making a pennant flag.

And I just caught Iris talking on the crayon telephone.

Celebrity Hearts

I tried really hard not to write this post, feeling slightly that it smacked of hubris, but I can’t resist. Something happened on Ravelry that made me deliriously happy, and I wanted to tell somebody … but 90% of my loyal blog readers (all ten of you) are non-knitters. I know you read this because you love me, and not so much knitting, and so I’ll include a little explanation.

I belong to an online knitting/crocheting/spinning forum called Ravelry. It’s a place rather like the dreaded F—book. You can set up a profile, post pictures of your projects, access a large pattern database, and chat with other knitters/crocheters/spinners. You can also leave comments on other’s projects, and if you like them you can “heart” them. This can simply show your appreciation for a well-knit project, or it can mark something you’d like to try yourself in the future. I’ve been trying not to get too caught up in the heart thing, yet most of my projects have gathered a heart or two which thrills me to no end.

Then I posted the Handspun Veylas, which I have to admit are by far the most luxurious, and beautiful, little handspun project I’ve ever done. They were a big hit in the heart department. And here’s the thrilling thing. They received hearts from two genuine knitting celebrities: Jared Flood of Brooklyntweed, and Stephen West of Westknits. These men are amazing knitters and designers, the kind whose Ravelry project pages make me drool. They are the kind of knitting celebrities whose designs are done by countless knitters all over Ravelry, who get patterns published in Vogue Knitting, who teach with Meg Swansen (!),  … they’re the real deal in the knitting world. I really, really admire their talents. And they liked my handspun Veylas enough to heart them.

I heart you, Brooklyntweed and Westknits. You made my day.

We Ate Their Brains …

… And they were delicious, indeed. There’s nothing tastier than a vector for salt and butter.

Eva, Iris, Moira, in that order. The big girls did theirs all by themselves. Iris drew the face, I faithfully carved every wacky line. I’ve always said there’s nothing more frightening than a toddler jack-0-lantern. Iris’ has some particularly disturbing “hair” near the “eyes”.